Central to the notion of urban governance is the idea that different stakeholders — elected and unelected, powerful and weak, organised and ad hoc — participate more or less actively in the affairs of the city and in setting the agenda for future developments. This framework explicitly recognises the role of non-state actors, who have become more engaged in civic activities in recent years as a result of both top-down and bottom-up processes. Agendas promoting good governance, public-private partnerships in service delivery and popular participation in development projects emerged on the global scene at more or less the same time, gaining momentum throughout the 1990s. Regardless of their origins (e.g., multilateral lending institutions, social activism), all these agendas aim to open up decision-making processes that were formerly the prerogative of politicians and bureaucrats, and make public service more effi cient, more transparent and more accountable. At the same time, India has been undergoing economic reforms that have introduced new norms and references (e.g., cost recovery and fi scal rigour) with regard to urban management systems, and have given rise to new modalities of service delivery involving new actors.