A centrepiece of the Metagora process is the bottom-up approach. This approach, which is used in contrast with top-down approaches, includes certain advantages.The term “bottom-up approach†is most widely identified, in development programmes, with an ethos that promotes the largest achievable participation of the various actors concerned by the issue at stake. For the Metagora project, the term bears much the same meaning. Broadly speaking, the approach promoted among the Metagora pilot projects involved working with local and/or national stakeholders to identify locally-relevant democrative governance and human rights issues for which evidence-based assessment is pertinent, and then apply statistical methods and tools adapted to that particular context. This approach differs from top-down approaches in that the latter focus on the application of global norms to the measurement of human rights and democratic governance issues without adapting to national or local contexts.
A bottom-up approach is not always necessary for conducting human rights and democractic governance measurement exercises; but it is valuable in providing reliable and useful results. Metagora advocates that in the field of democratic governance and human rights, sharing information is essential if it is to be efficiently used in policy-making. Indeed, one of the most frequently cited advantages of the bottom-up approach is that it promotes and increases “ownership†of these kinds of exercises.
The Metagora project shows that that bottom-up and top-down approaches can complement each other. For instance, a major benefit of global top-down approaches is that they facilitate comparisons, thus providing investors, donors and other bodies with indicators on governance. However, top-down approaches are relatively unsuited for monitoring and evaluating national and local policies or strategies aimed at improving human rights and democratic governance. Often excessively aggregated and generalised, top-down indicators fail to take into account the specific contexts of individual countries, and thus the information available does not provide relevant data upon which targeted policies can be created and developed. A major limitation of bottom-up approaches is precisely that they usually fail to facilitate international comparisons. Metagora was thus conceived as a necessary and useful complement to these top-down approaches, more than as a competing alternative.
source
http://www.metagora.org/training/encyclopedia/bua.html
