This paper explores how due to capacity and funding constraints, local and regional governments may not always be able to fully meet their responsibilities as providers. When this happens, people tend to take matters into their own hands and establish informal or exclusionary private systems of service provision. Apart from these extreme cases, however, a wide range of governance models is available to cities and regions for the delivery of local public services. The following section includes a brief illustration of some of the most common models within this range.