Partnerships in urban development reflect the ‘wicked’ nature of regeneration efforts, often requiring attention to a range of investment and programmatic interdependencies. “Taxpayer revolts, tax and expenditure limits, cutbacks in federal grants, a deep recession, and the pervasive pall of public opprobrium for things governmental”, to quote Peterson (1985, p. 34), are some of the challenges that have reinforced this trend. To this end, partnerships have achieved what Hodge and Greve (2007) describe as an ‘iconic status’ in urban administration. Partnerships in the context of the ‘entrepreneurial city’ have been associated with the delivery of large scale schemes, often involving significant attention to the civic design. Investments in waterfronts, streetscapes, and public plazas are some examples. As Goldstein and Mele (2016) have however recently pointed out, a large literature on partnerships focuses on questions of motivations and outcomes, while the ‘inner workings’ of these arrangements are yet to be fully explored. This paper contributes to this scholarship by highlighting the utility of analytic constructs derived from a broader literature on governance, most notably so from the field of public administration. In that literature, the study of approaches to task delegation and performance monitoring defines a research agenda on the relations between principals and their agents, and is particularly insightful of how the question of accountability should be approached in the design of regeneration partnerships. In a study of the redevelopment of the waterfront at ‘Canalside’ and a former industrial district at ‘Larkinville’ in Buffalo (NY), this paper argues that structuring a role for design centers reinforces social accountability in regeneration partnerships with an emphasis on civic design. The next section presents an overview of partnerships and the question of accountability. Section 3 describes the redevelopment of Canalside and Larkinville, and the role of the Project for Public Spaces (PPS), and the Urban Design Group (UDP), the design centers. In Section 4, it is argued that a design center’s value vis a vis a partnership is two-fold: centers reinforce government’s leverage in securing privatesector partner agreement to public realm-improving regeneration schemes, while centers with design capacity reduce risks when governments cede control over the design of public environments through informal delegations. The paper concludes by arguing that the choosing of partners willing to involve a design center with a public mission and a culture of civil society stewardship are important factors in achieving partnership goals.