Editorial Preface

Citation

(2022), "Editorial Preface", Public Administration and Policy: An Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 25 No. 3, pp. 218-219. https://doi.org/10.1108/PAP-12-2022-105

This is the third issue of PAP in 2022 which comprises of two parts. The first part contains articles of the special issue on “Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: Opportunities, Challenges, and Policy Implications”. We are delighted to have Dr. Stephanie Wing Lee from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, College of Professional and Continuing Education as Guest Editor. There are six articles focusing on various aspects of teaching and learning in universities in Hong Kong, Macao and Morocco. They are written by academics and specialists in the related fields. Please refer to Dr. Lee's Introduction to the special issue for brief descriptions of each article.

For the second part, in addition to the articles of the special issue on teaching and learning, three regular articles on public administration practices in South Korea, gender-equal inheritance rights in Bangladesh, and community care services for the elderly in Hong Kong are included. A brief summary of these three articles is given below.

The first article “A behavioral approach to administrative reform: a case study of promoting proactive administration in South Korea” by Pan Suk Kim reviews how the South Korean government initiated proactive administration, what systems or mechanisms has the government utilized to promote proactive administration, what constraints the government faced in the process of administrative reform, and how it resolved them. This approach has contributed greatly to the substantial change in perception that public officials should pursue their work as actively as they can. While many countries have promoted various forms of administrative reforms, cases of behavioral innovation and proactive administration have been relatively scarce. This paper serves as a useful reference for consideration by other governments.

The second article on “Equality in contention: exploring the debates of gender-equal inheritance rights in Bangladesh” by Jinat Hossain and Ishtiaq Jamil evaluates what caused the debates and confusion in articulating a gender-equal inheritance policy in Bangladesh, and identifies the socio-political drivers and nature of the political power play that thwarted the policy's adoption. Based on a case study with in-depth semi-structured interviews and focus-group discussions, the findings illustrate that the controversies between the Islamic religion and national and international policies led to serious debates and confusion about gender-equal rights of inheritance in Bangladesh. The paper will be beneficial to policy makers who seek to formulate a gender-equal policy in a developing country with a Muslim majority.

The third article on “An evaluation of community care services for the elderly in Hong Kong” by Gigi Lam analyses community care services (CCS) in terms of availability, awareness, accessibility, and acceptance, untangles the deep-seated factors underlying the CCS and provides some short-term, medium-term, and long-term recommendations. Based on a literature review on government reports, consultation papers, Legislative Council papers and academic articles from 1980 to the present, this article reveals the problems of various services such as low awareness and accessibility of day respite services, as well as the core of the heavy reliance on the subvention model, in contrast to the adoption of the ‘mixed economy of care’ by residential care services.

I wish to thank Dr. Stephanie Wing Lee, Guest Editor, for inviting and editing papers for this special issue, as well as all the authors for contributing their papers to this issue and the reviewers for their critical but constructive comments in helping the authors to improve their papers. Finally, I thank Emerald and our editorial teams as well as the members of both the Asia Pacific Editorial Board and International Editorial Advisory Board for their contributions in making the successful publication of this issue possible. We hope these articles will enhance the understanding of the issues in teaching and learning in higher education and other topics on public administration and policy in Hong Kong and the Asia Pacific regions.

Peter K.W. Fong

Editor-in-Chief, PAP Journal

President, Hong Kong Public Administration Association

About the Editor-in-Chief

Professor Peter K.W. Fong, PhD (New York University), is President of Hong Kong Public Administration Association and Editor-in-Chief of PAP Journal. He teaches strategic management and supervises DBA students' dissertations of University of Wales TSD. He was appointed as Advisory/Visiting Professors by Tongji, Tsinghua, Renmin, and Tianjin Universities, Chinese University of HK and HK Poly U. He holds memberships of HK Institute of Planners & Planning Institute Australia. He was a Teaching Fellow of Judge Business School, University of Cambridge; Director of EMBA programme, HKU Business School; Associate Professor, Department of Urban Planning, HKU; Executive Vice President of City University of Macao; Honorary Professor, China Training Centre for Senior Civil Servants in Beijing; Studies Director, Civil Service Training & Development Institute, HKSAR Government; Visiting Scholar, MIT; and Consultants, the World Bank and Delta Asia Bank. Peter K.W. Fong can be contacted at: fongpeter@netvigator.com