Pathways to Family Policy in Half a Century of Population Control: International Paradigms and National Programmes

Abstract

AbstractThe size, structure, and productivity of populations have been major issues in politics since the emergence of the state in history. When the now-developed countries experienced the first wave of fertility decline, they reacted with population policy, including family policy, to counteract the looming reduction of national populations. After World War II, the opposite fear of global overpopulation started to dominate international discourse and population control became a model for national development. In our chapter, we ask whether this paradigm left room for a family policy. We analyse three major UN population conferences as platforms of interdependence and sketch how the two contrasting cases of China and Kenya have signalled commitment, criticism, or distance from global norms and whether their national policies mimicked global models.