This edited book assembles chapters that focus on how citizens are involved in the decision-making of local governments. Within this broad thematic area, our research within a Horizon 2020 project on “Local Government and the Changing Urban-Rural Interplay—LoGov”, which brought together the expertise of 18 partner institutions from six continents, has revealed several issues as particularly salient and under-researched from a global comparative perspective, namely. These issues are participation in local development and planning, in large-scale projects, participatory budgeting and the promises and pitfalls of digital participation. This chapter first discusses to what extent local citizen participation can be a remedy for the current crisis of representative democracy, then provides short introductions to the four above-mentioned issues and concludes with an overview of the guiding questions for the case studies included in this volume.