It is, of course, not customary to begin a chapter with quotes from three authors. We have done so because the quoted passages epitomize so concisely a debate that has been going on among policing scholars and policy-makers in the United Kingdom and several other countries for about the last 30 years. This debate has centred around four related, fundamental questions: What is ‘policing’? Who can legitimately be thought of as ‘policing providers’? How, and by whom should policing provision be governed in an era of plural provision, involving non-state as well as state providers? And what principles should underpin the answers to these three questions? This debate has not been confined to policing scholars and policy-makers in the United Kingdom (UK). In this chapter, however, we focus primarily on the UK debate because UK (and in particular English) policing scholars and policy-makers have played such a leading role in raising and addressing these questions, and have had such a significant influence over similar debates in other common law countries around the world. In focusing our attention on governance we, like Parker et al.,1 define governance as actions intended to shape the flow of events. We will explore debates about how best to shape policing provision with a particular emphasis on the role of legal and other forms of regulation in shaping the activities of policing providers. We will review where this debate has got to in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and make some suggestions as to directions that might be taken on these issues in the coming years. We start by considering those four questions.