ABSTRACT
The chapter analyzes how development actors around the world tried to influence population dynamics throughout the twentieth century. It focuses on “population control,” family planning, and the gendered assumptions of modernity that came along with these programs. In the second half of the twentieth century, when the world population grew from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 6.1 illion in 2000, these attempts to slow down population growth and combat “overpopulation” dominated the development-population-nexus in the so-called developing world. However, development experts also attempted to foster demographic growth and to steer migratory movements. The chapter combines the history of demographic theories – from Malthus’ take on balancing population and resources to the demographic transition theory – with an assessment of major international organizations in the field, such as the Population Council and the World Bank, and with a large number of case studies including Colombia, Kenya, and Egypt. These different threads reveal that population management is a history of powerful donors and advisors, as much as it is a history of local actors who implemented, adjusted, or remodeled their plans and of the women and men at the “receiving end” who rejected, endorsed, or cherished “fertility regulation,” new contraceptive methods, and other means of population management.
