We discuss exciting recent progress in the theoretical description of molecular ion dissociative recombination, with further applications to related processes such as molecular photoionization and rovibrationally-inelastic electron collisions with molecular ions. The techniques are based on quantum defect theory, an efficient tool for characterizing electron-ion collision processes, and on a generalized adiabatic formulation. When needed, the approximation of adiabaticity in the dissociative coordinate is lifted by taking non-adiabatic couplings explicitly into account. We concentrate on a time-independent theoretical framework that has been applied to describe dissociative recombination in ions such as H-3(+), its isotopologues (H2D+, D2H+ and D-3(+)), and HCO+ (DCO+). (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.