Accountable autonomy is an institutional design of administrative and democratic organization that tries to get the most out of civic participation and deliberation. The term was coined by political scientist Archon Fung. Accountable autonomy addresses the defects of decentralization and localism, such as group-think, inequality, and parochialism, through hybrid arrangements that allocate political power, function and responsibility between central authorities and local bodies. The terms “accountable” and “autonomy” might seem at odds with each other. Autonomy means both independence from central power and the capacity to accomplish its own ends. The second sense is what Fung stresses: ‘a conception of centralized action that counter-intuitively bolsters local capability without improperly