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A feminist exploration of ‘populationism’: engaging contemporary forms of population control
Abstract
Following the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994 in Cairo, which prompted a discursive shift from population control to reproductive health and rights in international development, policy experts and scholars have relegated population control to the realm of history. This presents a unique challenge to feminist critics who seek to identify manifestations of population control in the present. In this article, we consider the potential of ‘populationism’ as terminology that may assist in clarifying varied new manifestations of population control. We explicate three interrelated populationist strategies that focus on optimizing numbers (demo), spaces (geo), and life itself (bio). Through our elaboration of these three populationisms and their interaction, we seek to inspire feminist, intersectional responses to the pernicious social, economic and environmental problems that technocratic populationist interventions obscure.
... We offer this article as a complement to a wider set of reflections in the burgeoning field of studies of reproductive technologies which are aimed at addressing forms of exclusion, discrimination and stratification that are perpetuated in both the application of RTs and the ways in which they are studied (Bell 2014;Rudrappa 2015;Valdez and Deomampo 2019, Bhatia et al 2019, Davis 2019Benjamin 2019;Bridges 2011;Roberts 2017). We agree with Ginsburg and Rapp's (1995) foundational argument about moving reproduction to the centre of social theory. ...
... They apply "ethnographic methods in diverse settings to reveal the racism inherent to reproductive health care and policies" (2019, p. 556), looking across different RTs to identify reproductive injustice. Bhatia et al. (2019) have also set out to examine contemporary forms of population control, a logic that categorises people and turns them into numbers to rationalise the use of interventions which reinforce power asymmetries (see also Murphy 2017;Sasser 2018). This includes interventions to have 'better quality children' which move through fertility limitation to assisted reproduction. ...
The ever-expanding availability of reproductive technologies, the continued roll-out of ‘family planning’ and maternity services across low- and middle-income settings and the rapid development of the fertility industry mean that it is more likely than ever that individuals, especially women and gender non-conforming people, will engage with more than one RT at some point in their life. These multiple engagements with RTs will affect users’ expectations and uptake, as well as the technologies’ availability, commercial success, ethical status and social meanings. We argue that an integrated approach to the study of RTs and their users not only makes for better research, but also more politically conscious research, which questions some of the ideological precepts that have led to reproduction being parcelled out into biomedical specialisations and a disproportionate focus on particular forms of reproduction in particular disciplines within public health and social science research. We offer this article as part of a wider movement in the study of reproduction and reproductive technologies, which takes inspiration from the reproductive justice framework to address forms of exclusion, discrimination and stratification that are perpetuated in the development and application of reproductive technologies and the ways in which they are studied and theorised.
... Although FP 2020 uses the language of reproductive rights and maternal mortality reduction to frame contraceptive use, it reanimates neo-Malthusian logics of population control that posit fertility in SSA as a threat to the economic, political, and environmental stability-"the abundant life" (Murphy, 2017)of wealthy countries in the global North (Hartmann, 2014;Bhatia et al., 2019). Such initiatives prioritize a technical solution-contraception-to complex social, political, and economic problems such as food insecurity, land dispossession, and disinvestment in subsistence agriculture (much of which is performed by women in SSA [Rodgers and Akram-Lodhi, 2019]). ...
... At the same time, privatized approaches to reproductive health amplify broader inequalities in access to resources according to age, gender, geography, and race. Neoliberal discourses of empowerment and self-actualization through rational consumption of health services or goods such as family planning or facility-based delivery obscure the gendered and racialized anti-natalism of twenty-first century approaches to maternal and reproductive health (Bhatia et al., 2019;MacDonald, 2019). While the presence of misoprostol in pharmacies and hospitals increases access to safe reproductive health care for those who can afford the drug, it also abandons the most vulnerable women to cope with discriminatory abortion laws and under-resourced public health systems while aspiring to responsible reproductive behavior. ...
Misoprostol entered the global market under the name Cytotec in the mid-1980s for the treatment of gastric ulcers. Decades of research have since demonstrated the safety and effectiveness of off-label use of misoprostol as a uterotonic in pregnant women to prevent and treat post-partum hemorrhage, treat incomplete abortion, or terminate first-trimester pregnancy. Global health experts emphasize misoprostol’s potential to revolutionize access to reproductive health care in developing countries. Misoprostol does not require refrigeration, can be self-administered or with the aid of a non-physician, and is relatively inexpensive. It holds particular promise for improving reproductive health in sub-Saharan Africa, where most global maternal mortality related to post-partum hemorrhage and unsafe abortion occurs. Although misoprostol has been widely recognized as an essential obstetric medication, its application remains highly contested precisely because it disrupts medical and legal authority over pregnancy, delivery, and abortion. I draw on fieldwork in Francophone Africa to explore how global health organizations have negotiated misoprostol’s abortifacient qualities in their reproductive health work. I focus on this region not only because it has some of the world’s highest rates of maternal mortality, but also fertility, thereby situating misoprostol in a longer history of family planning programs in a region designated as a zone of overpopulation since the 1980s. Findings suggest that stakeholders adopt strategies that directly address safe abortion on the one hand, and integrate misoprostol into existing clinical protocols and pharmaceutical supply systems for legal obstetric indications on the other. Although misoprostol has generated important partnerships among regional stakeholders invested in reducing fertility and maternal mortality, the stigma of abortion stalls its integration into routine obstetric care and availability to the public. I demonstrate the promises and pitfalls of pharmaceuticalizing reproductive health: despite the availability of misoprostol in some health facilities and pharmacies, low-income and rural women continue to lack access not only to the drug, but to quality reproductive health care more generally.
... The editors of this special issue of Gender, Place and Culture develop the concept of "geopopulationism" to describe those discriminatory practices of space-making aimed at managing human populations, by controlling or restricting their mobility and/or access to particular places (Bhatia et al. 2019). In line with numerous scholars and writers who have commented on the securitization of climate policy (Hartmann 2010;White 2011;Gilbert 2012;Dalby 2013;McDonald 2013;Chaturvedi and Doyle 2015;Miller 2017;Telford 2018) we argue that geopopulationism be understood as an increasingly prominent policy framework through which the implications of a changing climate are being governedand it is one that is furthermore coming to rival (and among some governments surpass) efforts at the mitigation of carbon emissions and collective strategies for climate adaptation. ...
... The editors of this special issue introduce the concept of "geopopulationism" to describe how the tropes, logics and methods of population control, long criticized by feminists and largely discredited since the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, remain a subtle yet widespread mode of governance today, operationalized via discriminatory practices of "space-making" and control over human mobility and reproduction. This can involve "management, surveillance, governance and control to include or exclude particular people from particular spaces" and "modalities and spatialities [that] involve direct forms of violence necessary to enclose given populations, or other less visible forms of violence that can be part of strategies carried out in the name of population wellbeing or development" (Bhatia et al. 2019). ...
In the United States and beyond the challenges of global climate change are increasingly being governed via the militarization of nation-state borders rather than, or in addition to, the mitigation of carbon emissions and collective strategies for climate adaptation. In this article we apply the concept of “geopopulationism,” introduced by Bhatia et al. (this issue), to think through the zero-sum Manichaean logics of traditional geopolitical calculation and the ways these become applied to climate governance via the securitization of climate change-related migration. In order to disrupt this securitization of climate policy, we draw on the insights of feminist geopolitics and what Koopman calls “alter-geopolitics” to consider how contemporary grassroots movements like the Sanctuary movement and #BlackLivesMatter have made connections between political, economic and environmental vulnerabilities while developing relationships of solidarity and care that broaden, disseminate, distribute and regenerate security as an expansive and inclusive project. We conclude by considering ways that scholars can continue to ally ourselves with and contribute to these grassroots efforts.
... In addition, women's ongoing demands for reproductive health care and their reproductive well-being are heavily dependent on the availability and accessibility of health care systems. 34 Subsequently, reproductive rights knowledge is likely to be correlated with utilization of health care. We hypothesized that both utilization of health care and reproductive rights knowledge are likely to have significant effects on contraceptive use. ...
Introduction:
This study investigates the effects of utilization of health care and the level of reproductive rights knowledge on contraceptive use. Current family planning programs in developing countries utilize a two-pronged strategy involving improvement of level of reproductive rights and, right to access health care systems. The effectiveness of this strategy in developing countries such as Pakistan remains poorly investigated. This study aimed at examining the effect of reproductive rights knowledge on contraceptive use.
Methods:
The target population is educated, 18- to 45-year-old married Pakistani women. The sample is composed of 160 nonrandomly selected purposive group of women. We gathered data using a structured questionnaire and analyzed the data using several multivariate methods such as latent class analysis and multiple classification analysis.
Results:
Our results suggest that reproductive rights knowledge has no direct effect on contraceptive use. Furthermore, the level of utilization of the health care system plays a significant intervening role between reproductive rights knowledge and contraceptive use.
Discussion:
Our results call for improving access and availability of health care while strengthening the awareness and knowledge of reproductive rights among women to improve their capacity to utilize family planning methods. Public awareness and educational programs are indeed necessary to promote knowledge of reproductive rights among women in developing countries. As public health campaigns propagandize the crucial role reproductive rights play in improving women's reproductive health, it is important to maintain a structurally harmonious relationship between health care systems and family planning programs promoting contraceptive use. This approach is more likely to result in significant returns for public awareness campaigns promoting reproductive rights in developing countries.
... Reproductive and maternal health advocates urge governments and donors to invest in women's health not only as a matter of human rights, but because "it pays" (Storeng and Béhague, 2014) or leads to economic returns in other areas of health and development, including child survival and environmental sustainability (Murphy, 2017). Global campaigns for family planning and Safe Motherhood responsibilize women as modern subjects who, through careful consumption of health services and information, reduce bodily and environmental risk, thereby improving their own health and that of their families (Bhatia et al., 2019;MacDonald, 2019). Focusing on what gets foregrounded or elided by metrics, the articles in this collection answer the following questions. ...
Ontologies of intervention in global health involve a voracious appetite for data - collection of data as evidence of what is intervention is needed, the establishment of metrics to organize and make sense of that data, further surveillance and measures to determine whether interventions were successful and targets were met, and, increasingly, predictions that determine whether interventions will provide good returns on investments. This part-special issue, an ethnographic interrogation of contemporary metrics and ontologies of intervention enacted in the global South, investigates "behind the measures" of maternal and reproductive health: the imperfect but pragmatic processes of quantification, inventory, and recording; how metrics are imbued with meaning, morality, and power; and how targets and indicators shape or drive individual and institutional behavior, as well as policy and program creation.
In der Klimadebatte ist derzeit ein neomalthusianischer Reflex zu beobachten: Der Klimawandel wird über statistische Berechnungen in Zusammenhang mit einer wachsenden Weltbevölkerung gebracht, und Strategien der Geburtenkontrolle werden nahegelegt. Der Text diskutiert diese gefährliche Entwicklung kritisch: Untote Geister eines Denkens in der Kategorie ‚Bevölkerung‘ werden wiederbelebt, die untrennbar mit ihrer kolonialrassistischen und sozialdarwinistischen Geschichte verwickelt sind. Zunächst werden die Argumentationslinien sehr unterschiedlicher Akteur*innen rekonstruiert, die sich auf diese Rationalität einlassen: ein ökologischer Mainstream, der Bevölkerung als schädlichen ‚Faktor‘ berechnet, die extreme Rechte, für die biopolitische Argumentationsmuster eine Andockstelle an den Klimadiskurs darstellen, und feministische und klimaaktivistische Aufrufe zum ‚Gebärstreik‘. Daraufhin werden drei Dimensionen in diesen Argumentationslinien unterschieden: die abstrakte statistische Konstruktion eines Zuviels an menschlicher Bevölkerung, die historisch tief verwurzelte Zuschreibung dieses Zuviels an die ‚Anderen‘, sowie totalitäre Planungsvisionen einer global zu managenden ‚Fertilität‘. Im Schlussteil plädiert die Autorin aus einer Perspektive reproduktiver Gerechtigkeit für ein radikales Zurückweisen dieser Verknüpfung von Bevölkerung und Klimawandel.
Agricultural and reproductive technologies ostensibly represent opposing poles within discourses on population growth: one aims to ‘feed the world,’ while the other seeks to limit the number of mouths there are to feed. There is, however, an urgent need to critically interrogate new discourses linking population size with climate change and promoting agricultural and reproductive technologies as a means to address associated problems. This article analyses the specific discourses produced by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) in relation to these ‘population technologies’ and ‘climate-smart’ agriculture in particular. Drawing on concepts and approaches developed by Black, postcolonial and Marxist feminists including intersectionality, racial capitalism, social reproduction, and reproductive and environmental justice, we explore how within these discourses, the ‘geo-populationism’ of the BMGF’s climate-smart agriculture initiatives, like the ‘demo-populationism’ of its family planning interventions, mobilises neoliberal notions of empowerment, productivity and innovation. Not only do these populationist discourses reinforce neoliberal framings and policies which extend existing regimes of racialised and gendered socio-spatial inequality, but they also underwrite global capital accumulation through new science and technologies. The BMGF’s representations of its climate-smart agriculture initiatives offer the opportunity to understand how threats of climate change are mobilised to reanimate and repackage the Malthusian disequilibrium between human fertility and agricultural productivity. Drawing upon our readings of these discourses, we critically propose the concept of ‘necro-populationism’ to refer to processes that target racialised and gendered populations for dispossession, toxification, slow death and embodied violence, even while direct accountability for the effects of these changes is dispersed. We also identify a need for further research which will not only trace the ways in which the BMGF’s global policies are materialised, spatialised, reproduced and reoriented by multiple actors in local contexts, but will also recognise and affirm the diverse forms through which these ‘necro-populationist’ processes are disavowed and resisted.
In this themed section, we identify three forms of populationism and bring them into conversation, which allows us to mount feminist challenges to present day forms of population control. These interventions are timely and necessary because of the continued prevalence of population control ideology and population alarmism in sustainable development and climate change policy and programs. We issue a direct challenge to scholarship that links population reduction with climate change adaptation and mitigation and the survival of the planet. The introduction provides an overview of our key argument, that seemingly disparate phenomena—technocratic approaches to fertility control, climate change securitization, Zika assemblages, neo-Malthusian articulations of the Anthropocene, and ‘climate-smart’ agriculture—are entangled with and expressions of demo, geo and biopopulationisms. We employ feminist critiques to contest these manifestations of population control that restrict bodies, reinforce boundaries, and create spaces of exclusion and violence.
In this paper, we argue that target-driven population policy enables the return of technical solutions to reproductive health challenges in the form of long-acting reversible contraception (LARC). We examine two Family Planning 2020 (FP2020) commitments related to promotion of the injectable contraceptive Sayana Press and the implant Jadelle. These efforts reintroduce controversial contraceptive methods (Depo-Provera and Norplant); involve public-private partnerships between donors, governments, NGOs and Big Pharma; and facilitate capital accumulation from contraceptive sales in the global South. We employ a demopopulationist lens to highlight the use of neo-Malthusian ideology to justify reducing population growth and engineering population composition. In a geopopulationist frame, Sayana Press and Jadelle reinforce unequal geographies in which the Global North serves as a space of technological innovation and policy-making, and the poorest countries in the Global South, including many in Africa, serve as the laboratory for clinical trials, interventions in fertility, and capital extraction. Finally, the way these contraceptive technologies are promoted harks back to the biopopulationist promise of improving life itself.
In 2016, during the Zika epidemic, scientists discovered another disturbing effect of the virus: pregnant women with the Zika virus faced the risk of having babies with microcephaly. Governments and international organizations responded by encouraging women to delay pregnancy and also by surveying their domestic spaces and water management practices. Feminist scholars and activists criticized these measures as ignoring barriers to quality reproductive health services and women’s particular vulnerabilities to climate change, as the virus was soon associated with global warming. This article critically analyzes the unequal and differentiated position of women during the 2015–2016 Zika outbreak. Through the concept of the Zika assemblage, we discuss how populationist interventions upon women’s bodies also involved particular representations of these bodies within different spaces and scales, from the household to the local and the global. We consider the geographical imaginaries and realities that shaped the identities and bodies of those women, as well as their connections with geopolitical notions of security and emergency. In this way, we expose how impoverished women from the Global South ended up bearing the responsibility to maintain an international epidemiological order. The article concludes with a reflection on the dissonance between populationist interventions and the root causes of climate change and environmental injustice.
The People, Place, and Space Reader brings together the excerpted writings of scholars, designers, and activists from a variety of fields upon which we draw in our teaching and research to make sense of the makings and meanings of the world we inhabit. They help us to understand the relationships between people and the environment at all scales, and to consider the active roles individuals, groups, and social structures play in creating the environments in which people live, work, and play. These readings highlight the ways in which space and place are produced through large- and small-scale social, political, and economic practices, and offer new ways to think about how people engage the environment in multiple and diverse ways. The People, Place, and Space Reader provides a road-map for thinking about these concerns, offering guides for some familiar paths while charting new routes to recognizing and heralding differences in perception, experience, and practice that traverse disciplinary boundaries, period, and location. Emphasizing interdisciplinarity, this reader provides multiple entry points to join these conversations about what may seem to be quite disparate works and conceptual worlds.
There is no question that anthropogenic processes have had planetary effects, in inter/intraaction with other processes and species, for as long as our species can be identified (a few tens of thousand years); and agriculture has been huge (a few thousand years). Of course, from the start the greatest planetary terraformers (and reformers) of all have been and still are bacteria and their kin, also in inter/intra-action of myriad kinds (including with people and their practices, technological and otherwise). 1 The spread of seed-dispersing plants millions of years before human agriculture was a planet-changing development, and so were many other revolutionary evolutionary ecological developmental historical events. People joined the bumptious fray early and dynamically, even before they/we were critters who were later named Homo sapiens. But I think the issues about naming relevant to the Anthropocene, Plantationocene, or Capitalocene have to do with scale, rate/speed, synchronicity, and complexity. The constant question when considering systemic phenomena has to be, when do changes in degree become changes in kind, and what are the effects of bioculturally, biotechnically, biopolitically, historically situated people (not Man) relative to, and combined with, the effects of other species assemblages and other biotic/abiotic forces? No species, not even our own arrogant one pretending to be good individuals in so-called modern Western scripts, acts alone; assemblages of organic species and of abiotic actors make history, the evolutionary kind and the other kinds too. But, is there an inflection point of consequence that changes the name of the “game” of life on earth for everybody and everything? It's more than climate change; it's also extraordinary burdens of toxic chemistry, mining, depletion of lakes and rivers under and above ground, ecosystem simplification, vast genocides of people and other critters, etc, etc, in systemically linked patterns that threaten major system collapse after major system collapse after major system collapse. Recursion can be a drag. Anna Tsing in a recent paper called “Feral Biologies” suggests that the inflection point between the Holocene and the Anthropocene might be the wiping out of most of the refugia from which diverse species assemblages (with or without people) can be reconstituted after major events (like desertification, or clear cutting, or, or, …). 2 This is kin to the World-Ecology
This essay explores the changing landscape of food sovereignty politics in the shadow of the so-called ‘land grab’. While the food sovereignty movement emerged within a global agrarian crisis conjuncture triggered by northern dumping of foodstuffs, institutionalized in WTO trade rules, the twenty-first-century food, energy and financial crises intensify this crisis for the world's rural poor (inflating prices of staple foods and agri-inputs) deepening the process of dispossession. The circulation of food is compounded by global financial flows into enclosing land for industrial agriculture and/or speculation, challenging small producer rights across the world. Under these conditions, the terms of struggle for the food sovereignty movement are shifting towards a human rights politics on the ground as well as in global forums like the FAO's Committee on World Food Security. This includes in particular the need to develop a discursive politics to reframe what is at stake, namely the protection and support of a production model based on social co-operation, multi-functionality and ecologically restorative principles.
Through analysis of a Guatemalan ecotourism project, this paper examines how tourism development is driving the militarization of conservation through a modality of violence I identify as counterinsurgency ecotourism. I look at four manifestations of counterinsurgency ecotourism: the repurposing of the army to enforce conservation law; the creation of an environmental 'predator' discourse; the eviction of peasants from protected areas; and the construction of military outposts. These practices illustrate that ecotourism development has become a means by which the Guatemalan state is militarizing conservation spaces in ways that revive and repurpose tactics of counterinsurgency warfare from the country's civil war (1960-96). Furthermore, this militarized approach to ecotourism development obscures the structural production of poverty, insecurity, and deforestation in northern Guatemala and undermines environmental conservation and social justice efforts. The counterinsurgency ecotourism practices identified in Guatemala resonate with many other conservation and ecotourism spaces found across the world, such as UNESCO Biospheres, as well places across the Global South with histories of counterinsurgency warfare.
Building from scholarship charting the complex, often ambivalent, relationship between military activity and the environment, and the more recent critical geographical work on militarization, this article sheds light on a particular meshing of militarization and conservation: green militarization. An intensifying yet surprisingly understudied trend around the world, this is the use of military and paramilitary personnel, training, technologies, and partnerships in the pursuit of conservation efforts. I introduce this concept, first, as a call for more sustained scholarly investigation into the militarization of conservation practice. More modestly, the article offers its own contribution to this end by turning to South Africa's Kruger National Park, the world's most concentrated site of commercial rhino poaching. Focusing on the state's multilayered and increasingly lethal militarized response to what is itself a highly militarized practice, I illustrate how the spatial qualities of protected areas matter immensely for the convergence of conservation and militarization and the concrete forms this convergence takes. For Kruger, these include its status as a national park framed by a semiporous international border and its expansive, often dense terrain. Steering clear of spatial determinism, I equally show how spatial contours authorize militarization only once they articulate with particular assumptions and values; for Kruger these amount to political–ecological values regarding the nation-state, its sovereignty, and its natural heritage. The result is an intensifying interlocking of conservation and militarization that frequently produces unforeseen consequences.
This article argues that populationism as a gendered narrative provides a crucial rhetorical architecture for welfare reform debates in the USA during the 1990s. Populationism, which Joni Seager defines as 'the dogma and the rhetoric of population alarmism and population control,' subtly legitimized efforts to control and marginalize poor women's bodies in the context of welfare reform. The populationism underlying welfare reform hinges on a deep fear of engulfing social chaos if 'we' do not check the fertility of poor women, and particularly women of color. This article historically situates contemporary welfare politics by tracing in some detail how Malthus' original writings on population were constitutively linked to debates about 'poor relief' in early nineteenth century England. Exploring the gendered linkages between Malthus and social welfare policy in the 1800s allows us to understand how Malthus continues to haunt discourses about social welfare in the 1990s and beyond, with direct consequences for poor women and particularly poor women of color.
In the limited literature on gender and climate change, two themes predominate – women as vulnerable or virtuous in relation to the environment. Two viewpoints become obvious: women in the South will be affected more by climate change than men in those countries and that men in the North pollute more than women. The debates are structured in specific ways in the North and the South and the discussion in the article focuses largely on examples from Sweden and India. The article traces the lineage of the arguments to the women, environment and development discussions, examining how they recur in new forms in climate debates. Questioning assumptions about women's vulnerability and virtuousness, it highlights how a focus on women's vulnerability or virtuousness can deflect attention from inequalities in decision-making. By reiterating statements about poor women in the South and the pro-environmental women of the North, these assumptions reinforce North–South biases. Generalizations about women's vulnerability and virtuousness can lead to an increase in women's responsibility without corresponding rewards. There is need to contextualise debates on climate change to enable action and to respond effectively to its adverse effects in particular places.
This groundbreaking volume is the first comprehensive, critical examination of the rise of protected areas and their current social and economic position in our world. It examines the social impacts of protected areas, the conflicts that surround them, the alternatives to them and the conceptual categories they impose. The book explores key debates on devolution, participation and democracy; the role and uniqueness of indigenous peoples and other local communities; institutions and resource management; hegemony, myth and symbolic power in conservation success stories; tourism, poverty and conservation; and the transformation of social and material relations which community conservation entails. For conservation practitioners and protected area professionals not accustomed to criticisms of their work, or students new to this complex field, the book will provide an understanding of the history and current state of affairs in the rise of protected areas. It introduces the concepts, theories and writers on which critiques of conservation have been built, and provides the means by which practitioners can understand problems with which they are wrestling. For advanced researchers the book will present a critique of the current debates on protected areas and provide a host of jumping off points for an array of research avenues © Dan Brockington, Rosaleen Duffy and Jim Igoe, 2008. All rights reserved.
Hurricane Katrina scoured the political economic landscape of New Orleans revealing the toll of decades of disinvestment in and 'hostile privatism' toward social reproduction in a city with corrosive inequalities around class, race, and gender. This piece addresses the failures of the state and capital around issues of social reproduction in the wake of Katrina, and gestures toward the sorts of activism these failures have called forth. Organized around five elements of social reproduction, including the environment and relief infrastructure, health care, education, housing, and social justice, the essay argues that the absence of these elements of the social wage both created conditions that made Katrina a disaster and thwarted response to the storm's social, economic, and physical destruction in New Orleans. The costs can be seen most obviously in the unevenness of neighborhood and infrastructural recovery, the difficulty of establishing a stable workforce of residents because of the lack of support for workers and their families which especially affects women and lone parents, and the deepening of various neoliberal tendencies toward privatization in education, health care, and housing. Examining the classed, gendered, and racialized nature of these issues, I will look at community based social movements working to redress this situation, and interrogate the underlying politics and policies - explicit and implicit - that have produced this situation.
In Making Sexual Stewards , Jade S. Sasser explores how a small network of international development actors, including private donors, NGO program managers, scientists, and youth advocates is bringing population back to the center of public environmental debate. With an increasing focus on climate change coming to dominate news media and international development circles, population advocates have harnessed an opportunity to reframe population growth as an urgent source of climate crisis, and a unique opportunity to support women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) via funding international family planning policy. Making Sexual Stewards follows the network through a diverse range of sites—from Silicon Valley foundation headquarters to youth advocacy trainings, the halls of Congress and an international climate change conference—to investigate how the new population advocacy is constructed and circulated, while drawing on longstanding development narratives linking population growth to environmental scarcity and geopolitical instability. Sasser argues that this advocacy revolves around framing the sexual steward: a neoliberal development subject sitting at the nexus of discourses linking scientific knowledge production, creative donor advocacy, and youthful advocacy focused on global social justice.
In contrast to claims made by some, it is evident from recent, high‐profile family planning programmes that population control is not ‘history’, belonging to some troubled past. Rather, it persists in the troubled present alongside human rights and women's empowerment approaches. To make this argument, this article examines two family planning efforts which emerged from the 2012 London Summit on Family Planning: the ‘120 by 20’ target of Family Planning 2020 (FP2020), and the Implant Access Program (IAP). These examples illustrate population control practices in today's family planning programmes and highlight their serious implications. First, there are shortcomings in conceptualizing population control as largely in the past. Second, the ‘120 by 20’ and IAP examples suggest that FP2020 as a whole merits critical inquiry. Third, FP2020 raises issues of contraceptive safety regarding both the methods promoted and their mass dissemination. Finally, the claim that population control is history blocks productive re‐visioning of sexual and reproductive health and rights for all people as a development priority.
This book explores how conditions for childbearing are changing in the 21st century under the impact of new biomedical technologies. Selective reproductive technologies (SRTs) - technologies that aim to prevent or promote the birth of particular kinds of children – are increasingly widespread across the globe. Wahlberg and Gammeltoft bring together a collection of essays providing unique ethnographic insights on how SRTs are made available within different cultural, socio-economic and regulatory settings and how people perceive and make use of these new possibilities as they envision and try to form their future lives. Topics covered include sex-selective abortions, termination of pregnancies following detection of fetal anomalies during prenatal screening, the development of preimplantation genetic diagnosis techniques as well as the screening of potential gamete donors by egg agencies and sperm banks. This is invaluable reading for scholars of medical anthropology, medical sociology and science and technology studies, as well as for the fields of gender studies, reproductive health and genetic disease research.
In 1959 CBS Reports presented the population explosion to viewers as a crisis whose ingredients were statistical. Conceptualizing quantification as a socially situated media practice, this article interrogates the history of the production and circulation of the demographic data and the iconic figures that brought the population crisis to life. The analysis exhumes the intertwined quantitative contingencies and affective associations in three demographic formations: the calibration of natural fertility and pregnancy risk that naturalized fertility as an excessive feature of “other” women's bodies; accounts of population dynamics haunted by racialized feminine figures of natural excess and cultural incompetence; and population projection procedures that elided mortality and amplified the effects of fertility on population growth and economic development. The resulting figures, deployed by US demographers in a concerted media campaign, provoked a mathematical panic about global futures that moved nations to intervene in women's reproductive lives.
This article argues that contrary to some recent theorizing of contemporary development interventions, ideologies of race and discursive and material processes of racialization remain central to development and are embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals. This is explored through an examination of current population policies, and in particular the ‘global family planning strategy’ initiated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in partnership with the British government. Population concerns are now routinely invoked in the context of neo-Malthusian discourses which relate migration, climate change, and conflict. This article argues however that contemporary population policies represent more than a discursive smokescreen for the destructive impacts of global capital accumulation—they are in fact deeply enmeshed in strategies for its expansion. As such, they rely upon embodied coercion and violence which is racialized and gendered, even as they invoke narratives of reproductive rights and choices.
The paper proposes a conceptualisation of space: as a product of relations, as integral to the possibility of multiplicity, and as open. Moreover, it is argued that this view of space accords with an emerging approach to politics which stresses anti-essentialism, a concern for difference, and a notion of the future as radically undecided. This view of space is contrasted with others which have held sway in the past and which are still important: in particular, the conceptualisations held by Bergson, by the structuralists, and with a modernity of grand narratives and partitioned spaces. It is argued, however, that the view of space proposed in the paper, while not making a claim to 'truth', can enable us, in the current conjuncture, to open up, formulate and address certain important political questions.
A vast academic, policy, practitioner, and activist literature, stretching back at least two decades, documents and analyzes the gendered dimensions of “natural” disasters and, more recently, of climate change.
The primary takeaway conclusion from the literally hundreds of studies and reports is a deceptively simple one: disasters are gendered in every aspect, including impacts of the disaster itself and impacts of the social disruption that follows, post-event recovery and reconstruction, policy formulations, and “lessons learned.” This chapter, following a brief review of the core findings in gendered disaster analysis, outlines four areas of research on gender and disasters – disaster vulnerability, post-disaster violence, early warning systems, and policy interventions – emphasizing emerging analyses and new findings. The enormous scale of violence against women associated with natural disasters is just now being acknowledged. Digitally-based systems represent new promise in early warning, but in many parts of the world patriarchal restrictions prevent women from using these technologies. Implementation of the gender commitments in the Hyogo Framework is shown to be lacking.
Almost everywhere in the world, gender-aware disaster policy is, at best, unfinished business; in many places in the world, it is actually “unstarted” business. The chapter concludes with three policy remedies: put patriarchy on the agenda, take “household”-level data and analysis off the agenda, and add real incentives to meet the gender commitments of Hyogo.
As sterilisation scandals abound, a consensus is emerging for a shift away from sterilisation towards a larger "basket" of contraceptive choices and concomitant improvements in service delivery. That such a shift needs to take place is clear, but precisely how it is to come about, and who gets to determine what is in the basket of choices are questions that deserve greater attention. The neo-Malthusian resurgence, combined with the technical fixation on contraception, favours certain methods over others, but health and safety concerns related to these methods are typically downplayed or suppressed.
The article elaborates the concept of demographization in light of the current revival of population-oriented agendas and demography as an important field of policy consultancy with special emphasis on Germany. It does so by referring to the Foucauldian concepts of biopolitics and governmentality, but also by exploring the limits of these concepts and by integrating them into an intersectional approach, emphasizing racist and classist selectivities and the genealogy of a Malthusian matrix. Moreover, the analysis elaborates a specific approach to reproductive relations as a biopolitical ‘hinge’. The article begins by exposing two empirical phases of demographization in Germany and then introduces the concept of demographization, distinguishing between different levels of critical analysis. Further on, a specific combination of purely quantitative and qualitative/selective rationales is presented as a Malthusian matrix and as central to understanding the processes of demographization. The following section addresses reproductive relations by combining the analysis of an individualizing governmentality of the reproductive self with the analysis of strategies of national-racist and classist exclusions at the biopolitical pole of population. Finally, the author explores how to apply the concept of demographization to transnational programmes of ‘population dynamics’ and anti-natalist policies in the Global South, and introduces further questions for theory development.
IntroductionMaking up the NationMaking Biological Citizens: From Public Value to BiovalueBiosociality: Active Biological CitizensPolitical Economies of Hope: Science, Citizenship, and the FutureProducing Biovalue: Materializing Ethics, Health, and WealthConclusion
Notes
Malthus’s privileging of population growth as the main cause of poverty, scarcity and war still resonates widely in both the public policy arena and popular culture. It shapes dominant discourses about the relationship between climate change, conflict and security in Africa. This article examines what I call the Malthusian Anticipatory Regime for Africa (MARA). MARA represents the convergence of current international strategies for reducing high fertility in sub-Saharan Africa through long-acting female contraception with climate conflict narratives that blame environmental degradation on population pressure and portray young African men as a security threat. Together these serve as a powerful gendered rationale for Western humanitarian and military interventions. MARA also plays a role in justifying the new land enclosures on the continent. How can critical scholarship more effectively challenge MARA and intervene in the politics of anticipating the future?
This article contends that the global thrust towards population management, legitimised by the concept of sustainable development, works to construct identities along the lines of gender and sexuality. This article focuses on the operation of what Foucault termed, biopower, as operational through and (re)productive of the United Nation's (UN) population/sustainable development discourses. I argue that the said disciplinary narratives and apparatuses such as the construction of environmental threat and the monitoring and regulating of populations, in the service of sustainable development, work to construct gendered identities and ‘naturalise’ heterosexual relationships. To demonstrate this, this article focuses on key UN documents directed at informing international environmental/population policy, namely Agenda 21 and the International Conference on Polulation and Development's Programme of Action.
Environmentalists and environmental organizations in the USA have long identified population growth as a key threat to environmental sustainability at local and global scales. The neo-Malthusian logics they invoke embed racialized images and categories in defining population “problems”, yet increasingly social justice language is invoked in population debates as a “solution” in the context of international development. This article explores the historical and contemporary characterizations of race as a central component of population–environment advocacy. It focuses on locations of race narratives in both the conceptualizations of population growth as an environmental problem, and family planning as a global solution. Through a critical analysis of the “population justice” framework, I argue that new discursive approaches attempt to reposition population work as socially just, while eliding critical analyses of race.
Placing labor at the center of the global ‘land-grab’ debate helps sharpen critical insights at two scales. At the scale of agricultural enterprises, a labor perspective highlights the jobs generated, and the rewards received, by people who work in and around large farms. This approach guides my critical reading of the report prepared by a World Bank team that argues for large-scale land acquisition as a way to reduce poverty. Using data from within the report itself, I show why poverty reduction is a very unlikely result. I develop the argument further by drawing on research in colonial and contemporary Indonesia, where large-scale plantations and associated smallholder contract schemes have a long history. A labor perspective is also relevant at the national and transnational scale, where it highlights the predicament of people whose labor is not needed by the global capitalist system. In much of the global South, the anticipated transition from the farm to factory has not taken place and education offers no solution, as vast numbers of educated people are unemployed. Unless vast numbers of jobs are created, or a global basic income grant is devised to redistribute the wealth generated in highly productive but labor-displacing ventures, any program that robs rural people of their foothold on the land must be firmly rejected.
To study the complexities of race and geography, research and analysis should center on the fatally dynamic coupling of power and difference signified by racism. The author considers briefly the theoretical and methodological implications of key frameworks geographers used during the past century to account for racialized power differentials. To illustrate the political, economic, and cultural capacities that historical materialist geographical inquiry ought to consider, the author outlines the background for a new project—a case study of the U.S. during a period of unusually intense state-building in the mid-twentieth century. The article concludes that the political geography of race consists of space, place, and location as shaped simultaneously by gender, class, and scale.
Are we too many? Few questions have sparked such heated debate in environmental political thought. It is a question that highlights fundamental tensions between humans and the environment, or people and resources. It stems from a belief that there is imbalance in the natural order and a profound sense of fear for the future of life on earth. It is a politically-charged 'can of worms' that gets opened up at particular times of crisis, such as the food riots of the late 18 th century, the oil shocks of the 1970s and most recently with the grim predictions of climate change. It is a question that is often met with scepticism (and worse) from those who think it is a red herring issue that is at odds with principles of social justice and human rights. A growing number of environmentalists have recently argued that the progressive left is wrong to put concerns about human rights ahead of the urgent need to address ecological problems of serious global proportions. No matter which side of the debate one identifies with, it is important to accept that 'are we too many?' is neither a straightforward scientific nor politically innocent question. It is loaded with assumptions and value judgements and is part of a discourse that does a very particular job of ideological work. As such, it ought to be unpacked carefully and examined critically. I suggest that looking at the assumptions, values and motives behind the question can tell us more about the issue than any answer that might be offered. In this short piece, I do not propose to answer to the question 'are we too many?' but instead to ask four questions about the question itself. These are: i) what are the implications of the phrase 'too many'? ii) why ask this particular question? iii) who is 'we'? and iv) how will the answer be used? These questions may help to deconstruct the issue in a way that not only prompts critical thinking but also renders the task of answering the question with certainty almost impossible. If readers go away asking even more questions about this perennial population question, then I will have accomplished my aim.
Over the last decade, carbon forestry has grown in Chiapas, where small farmers are increasingly turning to planting carbon-sequestering trees and the carbon market as a new source of income. Using an agrarian political ecology approach, and based on empirical research in a rainforest community in the Lacandon Jungle, I argue that while carbon offset producers continue to have formal land rights, they lose some of the short-term benefits of land in part through the use of land for carbon-sequestering trees but mostly through the preoccupation of labor. The labor requirements for carbon production act as a type of enclosure mechanism that constrains more traditional land uses such as the production of subsistence and annual cash crops. Nevertheless, campesinos continue to participate in carbon forestry as a means to maintain a foothold on their land in the wake of neoliberal agrarian policies that threaten to displace them. Carbon forestry enables campesinos to maintain their land through productive activity, which, though it delivers limited short-term income, allows them to stake claims to land by demonstrating active land use. This paper illustrates the continued relevance of the agrarian question.
While conflict-related dynamics are recognized as causes of land grabbing in Colombia, violent processes of exclusion and expropriation behind ‘greener’ projects are often seen as disconnected from them. The case of ecotourism in Tayrona National Natural Park makes it possible to explore the geographies of violence that sustain tourism in the area and their role in shaping everyday resource politics. This paper shows how green pretexts of paradisiacal spots in need of protection have contributed to privatization and dispossession. Furthermore, it details how land-grabbing dynamics have been enabled by processes of sociospatial demarcation that produce not-green-enough subjects as bodies-out-of-place.
Population control "is history" as they say, or soon will be. Now that population control has achieved a certain success (falling rates of fertility) and the end of the story is in sight, it is time to consider it as history rather than policy. the author proposes to knit up the raveled sleeve of histories that diverge as they multiply: top-down v. bottom-up ones, and the history of the control of population numbers v. the older and troubled project of controlling population quality (eugenics). In the end, the history of population control eludes a unified view because it does not have a singular nature. It is "an arena rather than an agenda," international in nature and inescapably multiple.
This article examines the capital value of bare life as part of aid/development in (post)Taliban Afghanistan. I argue that the political production and spatial fixity of homo sacer “as the object of aid and protection” within specific geographic locations subsequently territorializes gendered bodies as a site for capital accumulation and exchange value through aid/development allocation. This occurs through a continual discursive reduction of “full or proper” human life to the remnants of bare life. This subjective reduction subsequently elicits capitalist-modernity as a prime method for rescuing bare life and transferring it to an image (and imaginary) of western political and economic life. Gendered multiplicities of bare life emerge from variant forms of political and economic opportunity among aid/development workers and Afghan recipients. I argue that the discursive framing of bare life is situated as a site for (re)constructing rights through “western” frameworks infused with geopolitical and economic exchange value.
Whereas the concepts of class, poverty and race make regular appearances in social scientific analyses of global climate change, the same cannot be said for gender. A survey of the academic literature suggests that there is a lack of research into the many gender dimensions of climate change. The small amount of gender-sensitive work that exists has been carried out by gender, environment and development (GED) researchers working for the UN and non-governmental organisations who focus almost exclusively on the material impacts of climate change on vulnerable women in the Global South. In this paper I make two arguments about the current state of research on gender and climate change. First, I argue that although the GED research makes many important contributions to our understanding of the politics of climate change, it also contributes to an unnecessarily narrow understanding of gender, a fixation on 'impacts' that are material and measurable, and the view of women in the developing world, particularly those living in countries of the Indian Ocean Region, as victims of ecological crisis. Second, in response to these shortcomings, I argue for the development of a deeper gender analysis where materialistinformed empirical research on women is complemented by critical feminist theorising of the discursive constructions and categories that shape climate politics today.
Using the notion of a “geopolitics of mobility” this paper argues that international borders are more porous to capital than to displaced bodies. Juxtaposing these two levels of mobility generates two distinct but related geographies. Mobility is also theorized by seeing how colonial, Cold War, and ethno-nationalist struggles have shaped people's histories of migration, and by examining displaced groups in a context cognizant of both cultural and political difference as well as material relations of power. Focusing on the relationship between Europe and the Horn of Africa, especially movement of Somali peoples, the paper shows that a colonialism of derision has been transformed into a colonialism of compassion.
This paper critically examines the perceived threat of 'climate refugees' and 'climate conflict'. It locates the ideological roots of these concepts in development theories and policy narratives about demographically induced migration, environmental refugees and environmental security. While alarmist rhetoric around climate refugees and conflict has been deployed by a variety of actors, including U.N. agencies, development NGOs, national governments, security pundits and popular media, the paper concentrates on its strategic use by U.S. defence interests. It raises the question of how the portrayal of climate change as a security threat could further militarise the provision of development assistance and distort climate policy. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.