Top Down or Bottom Up? A Study of Grassroots NGOs’ Approach

NGOs deploy multiple approaches to achieve their objectives. These may broadly be classified as bottom up and top down. While a bottom-up approach emphasises local decision making, community participation and grassroots mobilisation/movements, the top-down approach focuses on lobbying and bargaining with the decision-making authorities such as government agencies, building up of pressures through various campaign mechanisms, advocacy activities, etc. This article draws insights from the literature and begins with a discussion on approaches undertaken by grassroots NGOs to meet their objectives. At the outset, the article ponders over a set of questions such as whether grassroots NGOs essentially follow a bottom-up approach. If so, why? Do they also intend to establish rapport with the state officials and thereby have say in the decision-making process? If so, how do they pursue it? This article, however, operationalises the bottom-up approach in terms of an array of indicators such as awareness building efforts of NGOs, people's participation in different phases of projects, and people's involvement in creating people's institutions. Similarly, it defines top-down approach on the basis of indicators such as NGOs’ participation in advocacy activity, obtaining support from government authority and obtaining favourable court verdicts. Despite the rhetoric, this article conclusively finds that no grassroots NGO practices either a bottom-up or top-down approach exclusively.