Accountable autonomy is an institutional design of administrative and democratic organization that tries to maximize civic
participation
Participation or Participant may refer to:
Politics
*Participation (decision making), mechanisms for people to participate in social decisions
*Civic participation, engagement by the citizens in government
*e-participation, citizen participation ...
and
deliberation
Deliberation is a process of thoughtfully weighing options, usually prior to voting. Deliberation emphasizes the use of logic and reason as opposed to power-struggle, creativity, or dialogue. Group decisions are generally made after deliberation ...
. Political scientist
Archon Fung
Archon Fung (born 6 April 1968), is the Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Democracy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and co-founder of the Transparency Policy Project. Fung served as an assistant profess ...
coined the term. Accountable autonomy addresses the defects of
decentralization
Decentralization or decentralisation is the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those regarding planning and decision making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group.
Conce ...
and
localism, such as
group-think,
inequality
Inequality may refer to:
Economics
* Attention inequality, unequal distribution of attention across users, groups of people, issues in etc. in attention economy
* Economic inequality, difference in economic well-being between population groups
* ...
, and
parochialism
Parochialism is the state of mind, whereby one focuses on small sections of an issue rather than considering its wider context. More generally, it consists of being narrow in scope. In that respect, it is a synonym of "provincialism". It may, pa ...
, through hybrid arrangements that allocate
political power
In social science and politics, power is the social production of an effect that determines the capacities, actions, beliefs, or conduct of actors. Power does not exclusively refer to the threat or use of force (coercion) by one actor against ...
, function and
responsibility between central authorities and local bodies. The terms “accountable” and “
autonomy
In developmental psychology and moral, political, and bioethical philosophy, autonomy, from , ''autonomos'', from αὐτο- ''auto-'' "self" and νόμος ''nomos'', "law", hence when combined understood to mean "one who gives oneself one's ...
” might seem at odds. Autonomy means independence from central power and the capacity to accomplish its ends. The second sense is what Fung stresses: ‘a conception of centralized action that counter-intuitively bolsters local capability without improperly and destructively encroaching upon it.’
Two examples of this agency structure are Chicago's
Alternative Policing Strategy and
Local School Councils
Every Chicago public school has a Local School Council (LSC) which consists of parents, community members, teachers, and the principal of the school. Members of the council are elected except in the case of teachers, staff and student representat ...
.
Design
The design of accountable autonomy exists in prescriptions for the efficacy of civic participation:
# Increasing discretion of street-level officials with respect to formal rules and centralized oversight, while making their actions transparent and open to critique for civilians;
# Generating innovations through engaging the local knowledge of civilians and diffusing insights through
benchmarking
Benchmarking is the practice of comparing business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and best practices from other companies. Dimensions typically measured are quality, time and cost.
Benchmarking is used to measure performan ...
of best practices;
# Having cross-functional coordination, not a rigid division of labor;
# Enhancing neighbourhood trust through tests of collaboration.
Fung argues that accountable autonomy increases fairness, because it offers ways for the least advantaged to act constructively against unfairness and it offers opportunities for civilians to deliberate about prioritization of problems and strategies to solve them.
See also
*
Subsidiarity
Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution. The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' defines subsidi ...
References
{{Reflist
Political terminology
Autonomy
New Urbanism
2000s neologisms
2006 neologisms