As a collective endeavour, the seeds of the idea for this book derived from a chance meeting at an academic conference in 2006, and was further inspired by a Nuffield Foundation sponsored seminar series on administrative justice. At the time of the meeting it was becoming clear that in their work a generation of ombudsmen in the UK and elsewhere were pursuing bolder strategies than their predecessors. This was a trend that we identified as requiring research. What we were also clear about was the need to locate any such study of the ombudsman community within developments in the wider administrative justice sector as a whole. Often academics have criticized governments in the past for the lack of rounded thinking, yet there has also been a tendency for academics to study the administrative system within institutional and disciplinary silos. It was this desire to establish a broader analysis of the ombudsman enterprise that led to the team approach in this project, which incorporated our respective expertise.