Top-down? Bottom-up? Or What's The Point of Arguing?

I believe I'll hardly raise eyebrows if I claim top-down approach doesn't exist in the dictionary of social entrepreneurship. Bottom-up approach is the automatic choice by virtue of its emphasis on engagement with grassroots communities and co-creation of solutions to tackle poverty. It's supposed to yield deeper understanding of community needs, constraints, and effective strategies to tackle real issues. I think I lost count of articles that portray failures of top-down development projects, they are rendered 'inherently ineffective'.

The question is: Is it even possible to do such seemingly academic classification with clear-cut qualities? In reality, aren't development projects that actively seek feedback from grassroots communities and co-develop solutions (bottom-up) eventually leading to organizations to take full ownership in implementing the strategy (top-down)? Depending on how we argue on definition, bottom-up approach might mirror effective top-down approach.

We acknowledge development projects are complex, but how frequent are we making simplistic attribution that projects fail because of top-down approach? Did we ever study bottom-up approach that fails? The point is that effective solutions may blend top-down and bottom-up approach to leverage on respective strengths. When you think about the analogy in framing Aid vs. Market debates, we encounter the same unproductive ideological arguments that mislead us into thinking it has to be either one but not both, when practitioners are already actively blending both to innovate new solutions and opportunities.

Instead of cherry-picking evidence to narrowly prove which one is better, why don't we examine and understand more in situations where top-down approach is necessary and critical characteristics in which it can be deployed effectively? I don't think we should miss the synergy in blending top-down and bottom-up approach, perhaps before we give a bashing to top-down approach next time, give deeper thoughts.