Administration of environmental health programmes. A systems view

Abstract

This volume in the WHO Public Health Papers series is addressed to students and practitioners of environmental health administration and its aim is to formulate within a unified framework the administrative concepts they will need and to illustrate how to apply these concepts directly to the special problems and circumstances they will be encountering. The framework chosen by the author is based on general systems theory, in the broadcast sense of the term, and the book makes clear the rationale for this choice. For one thing, although administrative theory has come a long way from the 'traditional' form associated with the rise of mass production, the current 'neoclassical' form may still be incapable of dealing with the specialization and fragmentation so pravelent today. Precisely because environmental health programmes will inevitably continue to be dispersed and specialized, they must be administered in such a way as to resist this centrifugal pull and achieve their results in harmony with other community health and socioeconomic development efforts. The use of the system approach, with its power to explain and tie together basically interrelated but functionally dispersed elements, thus appears as the necessary next step in the long, slow evolution of administrative theory and practice.