Gear menu unavailable Haven't been on Drupal for a while and now I seem to be lost at some points. Please help me get on the right track ;-)

I decided to build a theme based on the Stark theme and found out that the contextual menu gear widget does not appear. It's definitely a theme issue, because the widget comes up for the very same block when I switch the theme to, say, Garland.

What could be the reasone?
The contextual links are being exposed via contextual module. just by looking into the module, you would find the function contextual_preprocess.

 $variables['title_suffix']['contextual_links'] = array(
      '#type' =&gt; 'contextual_links', 
      '#contextual_links' =&gt; $element['#contextual_links'], 
      '#element' =&gt; $element,
    );


So my first guess would be, that you are missing in the block.tpl.php or page.tpl.php, etc... templates to output the $title_suffix variable?

&lt;?php print render($title_suffix); ?&gt;