Author-meets-bloggers I: Michael Egan, on Barry Commoner, science, and environmentalism.
Author-meets-bloggers II: Cyrus Mody on nanotechnology, ethics, and policy.
Below, The World's Fair sits down with Professor Saul Halfon in the first of a two-part conversation about his new book, The Cairo Consensus: Demographic Surveys, Women's Empowerment, and Regime Change in Population Policy (Lexington Books, 2006). Professor Halfon is a science policy scholar and an Assistant Professor of STS at Virginia Tech. He's a respected and sought after teacher and a gifted researcher. He's a good guy too. You should meet him.
This is the third in our author-meets-bloggers series. Please enjoy.
THE WORLD'S FAIR: What is it? What's the Cairo Consensus?
SAUL HALFON: The Cairo Consensus is shorthand for a new policy rhetoric that came to dominate international population policy in the mid 1990's, following a UN sponsored conference held in Cairo in 1994. Essentially, it suggests that rather than basing policy on the goal of "population control" we should focus our attention on "women's empowerment and reproductive health". In other words, it moves population policy from society-level demographic and environmental goals to individual levels goals based on rights and needs. I suggest that the word "consensus" here is actually more than just rhetorical shorthand, but that it actually signifies something meaningful about the quality and strength of this policy transition.
TWF: What's the basic scientific issue at play in the book? You know, is there a basic one? Or is it really complex and that was an inept question?
SH: The "science" here is the quantitative social science of demography. I explore how various technical theories and practices that are rooted in demography have come to shape the way that population policy is made, and vice versa.
There's also a "technology" question. That is, does technological development in this area (particularly contraceptive technology development) reflect and/or shape population policy more generally. The main issue here is how technological development has both conditioned the conversations held in Cairo and itself changed in response to these new policy pronouncements. Different sorts of contraceptive technologies facilitate different sorts of personal, family, community, and state relationships over bodily control and fertility decisionmaking. By paying attention to both what sorts of technologies are actually being developed, and the ways that policy organizations think and talk about contraceptive technologies, we can gain a lot of insight into the divide between rhetoric and action in population policy.
These questions are the simple part. The answers are where all of this gets rather complex.
TWF: The Population Problem, I hear, has been ongoing for some time. What's new by the end of the century as compared to the hot rod 50s?
SH: Well, that depends on how you think about "The Population Problem". If you take it as a real thing, that changes over time, then the story is the one we are familiar with from popular literature (often referred to as the demographic transition) - high birth and high death societies transition into low birth and low death societies, passing through a period of high birth and low death, which is the moment of explosive population growth. The 1950s-70s were the peak of this growth. Increasingly, population growth worldwide is declining, and we are headed to a new plateau in worldwide population. The main question here is whether growth rate or size is the real problem, and increasingly we see nuanced enumerations of what sorts of problems each causes.
TWF: What's distinct about your view on this?
SH: Well, I take a very different approach to this issue by treating "The Population Problem" not as a fact, but rather as a discourse. That is, as a way of talking about a large number of different sorts of problems that we articulate and experience through population concerns. So I look at how people have used population to make sense of problems as varied as poverty, environmental destruction, global security, economic growth, human rights, gender inequities, and post-colonial relations. The point is that this is still done, but very differently now than in the 50s.
TWF: Could you say more about women's rights and feminist theory, and what that has to do with the story?
SH: Well, as I said earlier, the new policy consensus is fundamentally shaped by concerns raised by women's groups and activists - reproductive health and rights and women's empowerment. There is a very interesting story here about the power of organized groups to shape international discourse. But essentially, these groups, along with others, made a compelling case that old approaches to the population problem were unethical and ineffective. They refocused attention on issues important to individual women - power, personal autonomy, and individual rights. From this frame, population policy as a practice faces a deep crisis of legitimacy and we can see the Cairo Consensus as a framework for overcoming that problem.
I don't want to suggest all is now well and good. Feminist theory warns us about the dangers of words like rights and empowerment, and the ongoing question is how these terms are interpreted and employed by various policy institutions. I suggest that current practice is still mixed, ethically speaking.
Part II is here.
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