The Annual Conference will explore some of the current problems and future challenges and opportunities in local governance. The organizers welcome submissions on any aspect of the broad area of local governance, but would particularly encourage papers on two main themes: A. The impact of the Economic and Financial Crisis on Local Governance; The conference will explore the impact of the present economic and financial crisis on local governance, as well as the role local governance can play in the mitigation and in the overcome of these, geographically uneven, social and economic effects. Welcomed are both country reports and cross-country perspectives on the new challenges faced by local governance. B. Citizen e-Participation in Urban Governance; Citizen participation in local government policy-making has been influenced, in different ways and with different outcomes, by the extensive use of information and communication technologies. With the advent of Web 2.0, a whole range of new possibilities emerged in the field of citizen participation in urban governance. This process has been empirically described and interpreted from different perspectives. The conference aims to enhance discussion on this rapidly moving issue and research field and to offer an updated account of these different perspectives, as well as of new cutting-edge methods and tools that have been employed to advance citizen engagement in local government policy-making. In this Conference, the organizers aim to explore and to discuss groundbreaking research in citizen participation in urban governance, in particular in the field of urban planning.