Background: Perversity was an ancient Greek goddess, worshipped around the fifth century BC. Temples to her have only recently been rediscovered by archeologists working in the north of Greece. She was worshipped, and feared, for her ability to turn people's worlds upside down and inside out, reversing and inverting all normal expectatons of how things should work in peoples lives. Like many Greek gods and goddesses she used her powers both for amusement and punishment. The following laws of development have been named after her. Perhaps they are even her legacy, left for us to struggle with, many generations later!.

1. The law of inverse attention. This law states that the smallest expenditures should be subject to the greatest control and review procedures, and the largest expenditures should be subject to the least, per $ or £ spent.

   
   
   

   The department of rough measures has introduced a corrolary of this law that states that performance measures used to assess the results of these investments should be designed on the same basis. In-country projects helping local organisations to increase their capacity to deliver essential services and meet the needs of the poor should be able to establish the long term impact of their work on peoples lives and the effectiveness of their capacity building activities. Larger scale expenditures at the national level and higher level should be exempt from this requirement. Measures of funds disbursed (i.e activity) and counts of numbers of people removed from poverty, regardless of cause, will be sufficient.





2. The dream to reality ratio This law requires the inversion of normal expectations about attention given to dreams versus reality. In development work the biggest investment should be on dreams (planning and starting up development projects) and only a modest investment made on reality (evaluating the end results of projects and closing them down). Some empirical research needs to be done on identifying what is the most common ratio at present, but 5:1 might be a reasonable estimate to start with. [PS: This law may need re-naming the law of diminishing attention]

   
   
   

   A corrollary to this law states that buy-in by other donors and host governments is most important at the dream stage. Buy in is not important at the stage when the funded activity starts to deliver tangible results. This will normally be near the end of the project's funding period.





3. Strategy rules over experience. This law states that it does not matter whether a project "on the ground" has been successful or not. If that project does not fit the latest conceptualisation (i.e. strategy) of what the organisation is doing then its experience is irrelevant. See "Where success does not matter" in the Editorial above.





4. "fire, aim, ready" This law requires that actions should be rationalised after being undertaken, and not before. For an early example see Caufield's history of the World Bank: "It was the availability of financing for such [infrastructure project] undertakings that stimulated philosophising about the vital role of economic infrastructure in the development process, rather than the reverse" [page. 15, Caufield, C. (1997) The World Bank and the Poverty of Nations. London. Pan]





5. The scale dependent nature of failure This law requires that small projects which show signs of failing to achieve their objectives should be closed down, as soon as possible. Large projects that show signs of failure should be given more money. If they continue to show signs of failure they should be given more money.





6. The scale dependent nature of evidence requirements. The larger the possible impact of a policy the less stringent the evidence requirements should be. Budget support to national governments may be one example. [more details needed here]





7. History began 3 years ago. Staffing in aid organisations should be designed to ensure that few people within project management offices or country programme offices (or elsewhere) have more than three years experience in those offices. There should be no mechanisms for securing long term commitments to specific actions across generations of staff in the same office or location. For example, ex-post evaluations 3 years after a project has ended.





8. Parallel universes. Where possible financial reporting and progress reporting (on implementation) should be done separately. Progress reports should not relate progress in any area to the scale of expenditure involved. Financial reports should avoid using categories that relate to those used in progress reporting. Not only should linkages be avoided, but comparability should be discouraged. (18/09/02)




9. The curse of excess resources AKA Midas' Touch. Rather than enabling much more to be done than ever before large budgets become a burden and can even undermine the effectivenes of previous investments. The focus is on how to spend the money, first and foremost. Staff time becomes heavily invested in project, oops, programme design and disinvested in events later in the programme cycle, where impact and lessons learned may be emerging. (29/03/02)

Sources: Perversity's laws are case law, rather than legislation based law. As such we need the readers help in identifying any relevant examples that embody any of the above laws, or any other laws that have yet to be documented.