For skeptics, though, Skolkovo was a state-led top-down project with little chance of long-run success.
And the drive for a single European currency was the ultimate top-down project, an elite vision imposed on highly reluctant voters.
It is a top-down project, with a lineage stretching back to the Enlightenment, in which technocrats come up with what they see as a blueprint for happiness: clear, rational and beautiful.
Mike Eastwood, director of the church's Renewal and Reform programme, said its aim was "not a top-down project to fix the church, but a narrative of local hope in God shared throughout the church.
The figures, pieced together from Chinese news reports and human rights organizations, are a stark reminder of how China's new wave of urbanization is at times a violent struggle between a powerful state and stubborn farmers — a top-down project that is different from the largely voluntary migration of farmers to cities during the 1980s, '90s and 2000s.
A combination of top-down (project concept and technical design) and bottom-up (field implementation design) approaches was used at the macro and operative levels, respectively.
The general trend in Zambia however, during the period of Global Initiative support to HIV programmes, has been to move towards top-down project support and away from investing in institution and community-building.
The "bottom-up" (locally initiated) approach has been suggested as having benefits like more staff buy-in, intrinsic reward for local staff, and a more customized and detail-oriented implementation [ 31], but when placing a bottom-up project in direct competition with a top-down project, these factors may not be sufficient.
But the dangers of a top-down, project-by-project approach to science infrastructure are clear.
You need to make this a collaborative effort, not a top-down procurement project".
The most profound weakness of the EU, from the Green point of view, is that it is a super-sized top-down dogmatic project of endless industrial development and growth.
