The paper will, first of all, address the changes which have taken place in the formal structures, that is in 'local government' in the accepted narrow meaning. Accordingly, only parsimonious use will be made of the term 'governance' , which has gained an all but inflationary currency in recent social science debate (see, e.g., Rhodes, 1997), where it denotes, in analytical terms, the manifold networks of non-public (societal etc.) organisations and actors operating outside and beyond the formal local government structures and, in normative-prescriptive terms, the modalities and their capacitl to co-ordinate and 'steer' these multi-faceted networts.