Population Politics and Development


Book Description

This book uses political and socio-anthropological theory to examine the relationship between power, interest, and agency within population and family planning discourse across Africa, with particular emphasis on case studies from Tanzania.




Population and Politics


Book Description

Analyzes scale effects across a range of political dimensions, encompassing different political levels using a multi-method approach.




Political Demography


Book Description

The field of political demography - the politics of population change - is dramatically underrepresented in political science. At a time when demographic changes - aging in the rich world, youth bulges in the developing world, ethnic and religious shifts, migration, and urbanization - are waxing as never before, this neglect is especially glaring and starkly contrasts with the enormous interest coming from policymakers and the media. "Ten years ago, [demography] was hardly on the radar screen," remarks Richard Jackson and Neil Howe of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, two contributors to this volume. "Today," they continue, "it dominates almost any discussion of America's long-term fiscal, economic, or foreign-policy direction." Demography is the most predictable of the social sciences: children born in the last five years will be the new workers, voters, soldiers, and potential insurgents of 2025 and the political elites of the 2050s. Whether in the West or the developing world, political scientists urgently need to understand the tectonics of demography in order to grasp the full context of today's political developments. This book begins to fill the gap from a global and historical perspective and with the hope that scholars and policymakers will take its insights on board to develop enlightened policies for our collective future.




Population Politics


Book Description

International efforts to regulate fertility rates so that populations do not grow beyond the earth's capacity have included technical assistance and capital; improved health care conditions to lower the risk of infant mortality; increased opportunities to develop literacy; the democratization of governments; and several decades of liberal immigration and refugee policies favoring third world nations. The persistence of high fertility despite international efforts confounds demographers. "Population Politics" brilliantly dissects the paradigm responsible for the counterproductive efforts of nations and international agencies. Abernethy, a renowned anthropologist, shows why policies hamper the shift to lower fertility. Ireland, Indonesia, Cuba, China, Turkey and Egypt are but a few of the countries Abernethy examines, showing how economic, sociocultural, and agricultural factors that have caused population growth can be harnessed to stabilize population size. "Population Politics" is a provocative examination of the influence of aid and liberal immigration policies on world population growth, and often counterproductive to the role of the United States as an industrial power. This volume's uniquely interdisciplinary perspective will enlighten the lay reader, as well as demographers and epidemiologists, conservationists, reproduction and family specialists, agricultural economists, and public health personnel. "Addresses one of the most vexing issues of our time--why after five or more decades of helping' poor countries improve their standard of living, is poverty still the rule? In light of Abernethy's facts, leaders in the United States cannot be excused from rethinking policies with respect to immigration and foreign aid. This book provides a fresh look at classic and neoclassic views of overpopulation."--Kingsley Davis, The Hoover Institution, Stanford, California "A splendid critique of how U.S. foreign aid and liberal immigration [policy] result in population growth here and abroad."--Donald L. Huddle, Rice University, Houston, Texas "Virginia D. Abernethy" is professor emeritus of psychiatry (anthropology) at Vanderbilt Medical School and was for 11 years the editor of the scholarly journal "Population and Environment. "Garrett Hardin" is emeritus professor of human ecology in the Department of Biological Sciences and the University of California, Santa Barbara.




Curbing Population Growth


Book Description

Oscar Harkavy offers a unique insider's view of the fascinating world of population politics. Chapters trace the growth of the movement as well as the various foundations, governments, and intergovernmental organizations which were an integral part of it from its beginning in the 1950s, through its growth during the 60s and 70s, to the present. Topics include the role of social science in understanding the causes and effects of population growth; reproductive research and contraceptive development; and the politics of family planning, sex education, and abortion in the United States.




Population Growth and Economic Development


Book Description

This book addresses nine relevant questions: Will population growth reduce the growth rate of per capita income because it reduces the per capita availability of exhaustible resources? How about for renewable resources? Will population growth aggravate degradation of the natural environment? Does more rapid growth reduce worker output and consumption? Do rapid growth and greater density lead to productivity gains through scale economies and thereby raise per capita income? Will rapid population growth reduce per capita levels of education and health? Will it increase inequality of income distribution? Is it an important source of labor problems and city population absorption? And, finally, do the economic effects of population growth justify government programs to reduce fertility that go beyond the provision of family planning services?




Creating a New Consensus on Population


Book Description

Population growth, reproductive health and reproductive rights are amongst the most pressing issues facing governments and the international community. Since the world's governments agreed for the first time on far-reaching and enlightened population policies at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, a good deal of progress has been made on these issues, but major challenges remain. This fully updated edition of Creating a New Consensus on Population charts international progress on efforts to address population and development, reproductive health, reproductive rights, religion, contraception and the empowerment of women. Historical coverage includes the lead up process to the ICPD, the conference itself and the global consensus and the ICPD Programme of Action that resulted. The book then turns to how population issues have developed over the past decade and a half including follow-up and implementation at the international level by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and other UN agencies and organizations. Key international events are covered including the 1999 ICPD+5, Millennium Summit 2000, ICPD+10 and the 2005 MDG+5 as well as relevant regional events. The book also examines the reorientation of policies and programmes and implementation at national levels across the world. Crucially, it looks at emerging issues and partnerships including the increasing role of NGOs, women's groups, youth groups, foundations, public-private partnerships and other non-state stakeholders. Written by Jyoti Shankar Singh, former ICPD Executive Coordinator, this is the definitive account of how the international community has engaged with population issues and policies and it offers insight into both the ongoing challenges as well as how an international consensus can be forged on crucial global issues. It is essential reading for all those involved in population, health and development issues and policies world-wide.




Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India


Book Description

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748856 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonized some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe. To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions—about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world. The open-access edition of Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India is freely available thanks to the TOME initiative and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries.




Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics


Book Description

"Remarkably, most conventional wisdom about the shifting balance of world power virtually ignores one of the most fundamental components of power: population. The studies that do consider international security and demographic trends almost unanimously focus on population growth as a liability. In contrast, the distinguished contributors to this volume--security experts from the Naval War College, the American Enterprise Institute, and other think tanks--contend that demographic decline in key world powers now poses a profound challenge to global stability. The countries at greatest risk are in the developed world, where birthrates are falling and populations are aging. Many have already lost significant human capital, capital that would have helped them innovate and fuel their economy, man their armed forces, and secure a place at the table of world power. By examining the effects of diverging population trends between the United States and Europe and the effects of rapid population aging in Japan, India, and China, this book uncovers increasing tensions within the transatlantic alliance and destabilizing trends in Asian security. Thus, it argues, relative demographic decline may well make the world less, and not more, secure."--Publisher.




Global Political Demography


Book Description

This open access book draws the big picture of how population change interplays with politics across the world from 1990 to 2040. Leading social scientists from a wide range of disciplines discuss, for the first time, all major political and policy aspects of population change as they play out differently in each major world region: North and South America; Sub-Saharan Africa and the MENA region; Western and East Central Europe; Russia, Belarus and Ukraine; East Asia; Southeast Asia; subcontinental India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; Australia and New Zealand. These macro-regional analyses are completed by cross-cutting global analyses of migration, religion and poverty, and age profiles and intra-state conflicts. From all angles, this book shows how strongly contextualized the political management and the political consequences of population change are. While long-term population ageing and short-term migration fluctuations present structural conditions, political actors play a key role in (mis-)managing, manipulating, and (under-)planning population change, which in turn determines how citizens in different groups react.