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Gender, demographic transition and the economics of family size
Kabeer, Naila
Kabeer, Naila
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opb7.pdf
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Abstract
"Population policies are central to the totality of development efforts because of their focus on the reproduction of people and therefore of the societies they belong to. In theory, population issues should cover the full gamut of concerns, from birth to death and the quality of life in between. In practice, however, for a variety of reasons population policy has tended to become reduced to a question of numbers: how to reduce or less frequently to increase the number of people that count within specific categories in order to meet the objectives set out by those with policy-making power. The relevant classificatory criteria take different forms in different political or economic contexts so that population concerns vary from seeking to prevent the birth of the second child in China; to promote the birth rates of Jewish population in Israel (Yuval-Davis, 1987) or educated women in Singapore (Leng and Khoon, 1984; Chan, 1985); or to sterilize women from poorer backgrounds in Puerto Rico (Mass, 1976). On a more global scale, the issue of numbers takes on a North-South dimension as fresh reasons emerge periodically for portraying population growth rates in the South as posing a threat to the global order. The panic around population growth has focused in turn on its purported deleterious effects in relation to economic growth rates in the South, to the geopolitical concerns of the North, to the fragility of the global ecosystem and, more recently, to the possibility of mass emigration from the South with adverse consequences for Northern standards of living (Connelly and Kennedy, 1994). Political and developmental considerations are inextricably intertwined in the population question. The objective of this paper is not to consider the validity or otherwise of the links between population growth rates and the series of apocalyptic scenarios noted above, since the evidence is controversial and inconclusive. Instead, it takes as its starting point the view that while there are sound policy grounds for keeping population questions at the centre of development discourse, the conceptualization of the problem has been skewed by its indifference to the intrinsic human dimension of the inter-relationship between the two, and in particular to the gender dimension of this inter-relationship. A human-centred development starts from the recognition that, since human survival and well-being are the desired goals of all development endeavour and since human agency and creativity help to activate all forms of production, human beings are uniquely both the means and the ends of the development effort, of intrinsic as well as instrumental value. A human-centred development recognizes women as key actors in the development process not only because their survival and well-being as human beings are ends in themselves, but also because they are the actors most closely connected with the reproduction, maintenance and care of human resources (Kabeer, 1994a). In this paper, we will be concerned with both these dimensions in the reproductive process: well-being and agency. The former focuses on outcomes: the extent to which families, and children in particular, benefit from different reproductive strategies. The latter is concerned with the capacity of different categories of family members to exercise judgement in the field of reproductive decision-making and to promote change on the basis of their own priorities and interests (Sen,"(pg 1)
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1996-06
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With permission of the license/copyright holder