The Imperative of Good Local Governance is a true state-of-the-art volume in the field of local governance, decentralisation and local democracy summarising a substantial part of the insights from original research in the last decade. It is also a future-looking volume with explicit policy relevance, paving the way for innovative thinking (and acting) on the next phase of development in the field. In a unique way it brings together authoritative contributions from authors that to a large extent have been defining the field for the last decade or more. From a theoretical perspective it is adjoining top-down and bottom-up rationalities, which is further illuminated through a wide variety of key case studies. The case studies are selected for their relevance for the theoretical perspectives offered, as well as for their paradigmatic power in the current global evolution of decentralised policies and politics. The volume concludes that overall, local development and local politics will not go away - it has a huge potential - but also that the field is full of unfulfilled promises, some of which could be remedied through the perspectives revealed in this volume.