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This paper aims to examine the connections between community and community facilities, and the implications for local government facility management.

In addition to cited published literature, the paper draws on archival and case study research and interviews with local government managers and local residents conducted by the author.

The financing, planning and management of community facilities has emerged as a major public policy issue in Australia in recent years as assets acquired in the post‐World War II years of growth and decentralisation age, service needs widen and local governments experience fiscal stress. During this period, awareness of the limits of state provision and market individualism has brought renewed focus on community, and policy outputs, particularly at local government level, are increasingly framed around community strengthening.

The research focus is Victoria, Australia.

The paper identifies key strategic issues for facility planners and managers involved in regeneration projects.

Strategic management of facilities is now generally accepted best practice. Appraisal of facility performance has developed correspondingly and financial measures are no longer seen as the prime indicator of success. Holistic models that include the processes supporting fulfilment of an organisation’s strategic aims are now considered to provide more appropriate measures. Recent focus in the service‐oriented context of local government authority (LGA) facility management has particularly turned toward such models. This paper discusses the issues and inherent tensions arising from the strategic measurement of local government facilities in a service delivery context. It is argued that outwardly the strategic objective of service delivery is common to the private and public sectors, but fundamental differences in the desired outcomes and responsibilities of the two sectors require different solutions. Even if one accepts the current trend in ‘balanced’ performance measurement, differing parameters in the private and public sectors impact on the design and evaluation of performance measures, especially in relation to process, efficiency, strategy formulation and responsiveness of the organisation to customer needs. If a facility is considered to be an enabler of processes that lead to desired outcomes, these differences must necessarily affect the design of facility performance measurement tools. The research with eight LGAs, reported here, supports the need for a new model for the evaluation of community facilities applicable in the local government context. Using stakeholder‐based focus groups, the need was identified for a service‐oriented model, where the facility is understood as the intersection of aspects of service provision, physical building substance and the community utilising the facility.

Over the past two decades, Community-Based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) has been a pragmatic strategy towards universal Primary Health Care (PHC) in Ghana. However, the ability and capacity of these facilities to deliver quality primary health care remain an illusion as they are still crumbling in myriad challenges. These challenges are translated to the poor-quality services provision and low community utilization of CHPS facilities. The study presents a comparative analysis of three communities in the Kassena-Nankana East Municipality, Ghana.

Using a mixed-method research design, the study gathered and analysed data from 110 households, three community health officers (CHOs) and three community leaders using semi-structured questionnaires and interview guides.

The findings indicated that the facilities do not have the requisite inputs such as drugs and supplies, logistics, appropriate health personnel, good infrastructure, funding support necessary to deliver quality and appropriate healthcare services that meet the health needs of the communities. For the CHPS to realize their full potentials as PHC facilities, it is required that the needed inputs such as logistics, drugs and appropriate staff are in place to facilitate the activities of CHOs.

Due to the limited number of participants and selection of the study communities, the results may generalization. Also, the researchers acknowledged the inability to interview the district level health officials and the Kassena-Nankana Municipal Assembly during the field visits. This could have provided in-depth knowledge on the findings of this research as well as the validation of the results from the communities' perspective. Several attempts were made to contact and interview district-level authorities which proven futile due to the unavailability of targeted respondents. This resulted in limiting the studies at the community level. However, this limitation does not disprove the findings of this study.

The article implications for planning primary health care strategies include a keen assessment of community health needs and institutional management of primary health care facilities, equip PHC facilities with adequate resources such as drugs and appropriate staffing to provide the health needs of the communities.

The paper fulfils the gap in the literature by providing empirical data on how the challenges of primary health care facilities affected the provision of high quality service and how this can affect community’s use of the facilities.

By involving the beneficiaries of a facility such as housing or an irrigation scheme, at the various stages of the project, it is possible to build their capacity in relation to the facility, which may contribute to the sustainability of the project beyond the disbursement period. A study carried out in Botswana found that the intensity of community participation at the various stages of facility development is influenced by the complexity of the technology adopted and the willingness of the facility managers to involve the community from the early stages of the project. Based on these findings, this paper proposes a framework which may be followed to achieve this end.

The design and construction of infrastructure facilities such as road network, water supply and sewage disposal in Botswana, have often been done in a top‐bottom fashion where the government or local authority decides what is good for the community. While the design and construction of infrastructure facilities require technical knowledge, heavy equipment and proper supervision, their management hardly requires these resources to the same extent. This offers the beneficiaries of the facilities an opportunity to manage their day‐to‐day operations and maintenance. Reports on an approach adopted to engage the community in the management of local road network, water supply and sanitation in three major villages in Botswana. It analyses the method previously employed in managing these facilities and outlines the benefits which will accrue when this approach is fully operational. Concludes by underlining the fact that, for community‐managed facilities to work, the people in the community need to participate in all the stages of the project (i.e. planning, design, construction and eventually maintenance).

Correctional facilities often constitute locally unwanted land use (LULUs), with local residents strongly demanding their relocation. Accordingly, the construction of correctional facilities is currently being promoted in regions that are far from city centres. Some local government officials consider relocating correctional facilities to rural areas as a golden opportunity to revitalise the economies of these areas. This paper focuses on the possibilities of local community participation in the sustainable development of prison siting in rural areas.

The methods and procedure of this study are as follows: (1) to review the relevant literature about regulations or cohesion policies when correctional facilities are constructed, (2) to examine the current issues relating to the conflict between correctional facilities and the local community from the perspective of LULUs and (3) to compare the construction processes of correctional facilities and public buildings in South Korea. The latter focuses on Daegu Correctional Facility as a site study through which to investigate how the facility interacted with the local community when the government decided to locate the correctional facility in a rural area.

The case study confirmed that communication methods between correctional facilities and stakeholders at each stage affected the occurrence and resolution of conflicts between them. In particular, it was found that correctional facilities in rural areas can transform the characteristics of the community by providing an open facility that serves community needs and boosts the local economy.

This study contributes to a new vision for locating correctional facilities, wherein conflicts are resolved through communication with local communities in rural regions. In addition, the study argues that community participation could allow correctional facilities to function as living hubs in the community and so benefit the residents of rural areas.

This paper's purpose is to identify successful methods used to integrate stakeholders into the early phases of strategic community facility projects.

A two‐stage research method was used at project inception and design phases of a community facility. Project inception used action research pre‐design strategic needs analysis workshops with internal local authority stakeholders to capture the council's internal stakeholders' agreed strategic aspirations, resulting in a performance‐based brief. Subsequently, observation‐based research investigated project processes conducted by others. Owing to the nature of the brief, additional engagement was required with stakeholders internal and external to the council.

The processes integrating council and municipal stakeholders are described. These included identification of stakeholders and their roles in project processes. Stakeholders were shown to be the target for individual strategies within the facility's multiple strategies. Management practices employed by facility managers to integrate stakeholders were documented at strategic planning, project inception, governance and pre‐construction phases.

The research was conducted into a single facility but this is representative of other community facilities. This facility was significant for its multiple organisational and municipal strategies, and the high levels of stakeholder satisfaction. Stakeholders' early integration into project processes is likely to address a problematic expectation‐evaluation gap identified in the literature.

This paper identifies successful practices for facility managers to employ at early project phases.

Stakeholder integration is particularly important in community FM where there are multiple stakeholders and issues of internality and externality effects from facilities are debated.

Most segments of service industry are experiencing intense competition. Both researchers and practitioners have focused their attention on improving service operations. Proper location for a service facility is a major factor affecting the competitive position of a service operation. This article discusses the facility location problems and presents a simple heuristic that can be used to locate service facilities. The article reports the results of a simulation study which compared the performance of the proposed heuristic and another heuristic for locating service facilities with respect to computer processing time and explores how close the solutions are to the optimum solution. The results of the simulation indicate that the proposed heuristic is more efficient with respect to CPU time required to solve problems and gives more accurate results.

This study aims to ascertain the forms of social enterprises created for public services and the dimensions of community-based management of public facilities. It seeks to understand how community-based facilities management (CbFM) can apply to the management of public services created by social enterprises in developing communities.

The study examines research studies on CbFM through a scoping review of papers published between 1997 and 2022.

The scoping review revealed that there are five dimensions of CbFM for developing communities: CbFM, urban facilities management, sustainable CbFM, urban infrastructure management and management of community hubs. It also revealed that social enterprises have been used to manage services, and for social inclusion, and to increase the efficiency of tangible infrastructure in communities.

The scoping review included literature from 1997 to 2022 to understand the development trends in CbFM in developing communities. It is possible that literature from a broader timeframe could have produced more in-depth understanding of the subject investigated.

The paper articulates a framework of CbFM models for public services in developing communities and developed a database of the relevant studies, which can further guide future researchers, stakeholders and policymakers in this area.

The comprehensive review produced a framework for community management of public services. It also identified that there is a paucity of literature on social infrastructure. It highlighted the need for skillsets to support community-based enterprises. There are limited studies that touch on the development of performance indicators for developing communities.

To examine to what degree good buildings enable the delivery of high quality services.

This paper uses empirical data from a case study of two metropolitan councils in Melbourne, Australia. Both are committed to the strategic management of their community facilities to maximise service outcomes for their constituents. To this end they implemented a strategic tool to measure the facilities' performance, using key performance indicators.

The data indicates a statistically significant correlation of the performance of the physical building and the quality of the service delivered from it, supporting the hypothesis that better physical facilities engender better service outcomes.

The implications are that the strategic planning for buildings and services should be undertaken in concert to maximise the enabling effect the physical building has on service performance. While this study concentrates on council buildings, the findings may be equally applicable to other service businesses.

This paper has implications for the way facility management practice should be undertaken and fills a knowledge gap about the effect which the quality of the physical surrounds has on the processes taking place within.