This book is a welcome addition to the series Public Policy and Management, which should be familiar to social policy specialists. It seeks to ‘make sense of the unprecedented amount of change in ... the world of local government’ and provide ‘an overview of where local government as an institution is going’. At first it seems an impossible quest as the principal change-driver, the central government, operates by a process of ‘policy drift, opportunism and inconsistency’. And yet within the twists and turns of government policy, it is possible to discern a number of rational visions or strategic roles for local government which may (perhaps unconsciously) inform official and others' thinking about local government. It is these various perceptions about the role and purpose of local government which are the essential focus of this book (though the analysis does not go so far as to consider the neo-Marxist models of local government).