Since 1950, the world’s population has trebled, from around 2.5 billion to more than 7.5 billion in 2017. It is projected to exceed 9.7 billion by mid-century, rising to around 11.2 billion by 2100. Given a simultaneous rise in living standards and in environmental degradation, it seems timely to ask whether such numbers are sustainable. Demographic change can have enormous national as well as global impacts, especially if a population is growing (or diminishing) significantly. Higher densities affect everyday lives; more (or fewer) people may place substantial strains on social and ecological services; shifts in the ratio between births and deaths alter a country’s age profile and economic prospects. In short, demography matters. But should governments therefore try to control trends that are judged sub-optimal? This became one of the most bitterly contested issues of the twentieth century. Today, the outstanding question is not whether massive increases will continue indefinitely but, rather, whether the pace of fertility decline and slowing growth rates now witnessed virtually everywhere will, if left untended, yield a sustainable population within the constraints of the biosphere. If not, strenuous political efforts may be needed to achieve it. But can they be justified ethically?
Population control is commonly (although not necessarily) identified with reducing, even reversing, population growth. This only emerged as a serious issue during the eighteenth century, especially in ‘old’ countries like Britain that were already considered ‘over-peopled’. Industrialization showed that resources were more elastic than previously imagined. The idea of ending worldwide expansion of human numbers only emerged during the mid-twentieth century, with the appearance of new ecological sensibilities that recognized planet Earth as a single but fragile life-support system on which billions now depended. In ‘overdeveloped’ nations, evidence of environmental deterioration was attributed to the combination of a post-war baby boom and rising production and consumption; in ‘underdeveloped’ nations, rapid population growth was understood as an obstacle to development and a catalyst for an impending humanitarian crisis. The 1960s and 1970s were the heyday for heroic population-control narratives and policy initiatives that have since been disavowed as coercive. This is the core concern that any new intervention will need to address.
Despite the topic remaining toxic, there are renewed claims that world population growth is contributing significantly to a planetary environmental crisis and calls for government action to reduce it. The terminology of ‘population control’ is absent from this contemporary discourse but a goal of ‘population stabilization’ is not. In fact, most nations do practise interventionist policies: a majority of the 197 countries surveyed by the United Nations (UN) in 2013 reported policies for raising or reducing growth rates, primarily through influencing fertility behaviour. The population question has not been much discussed over recent decades but, as it re-emerges, it seems important to revisit and update arguments, taking into account the unprecedented biophysical circumstances, altered geopolitical relationships and novel discursive resources of the twenty-first century.
Three principal variables determine demographic trajectories: fertility, mortality and migration. Public interventions designed to increase life expectancy are commonplace and seldom questioned, although debates about voluntary euthanasia and the right to die are still in their infancy. Certainly, measures designed to limit numbers by raising the death rate would be universally reviled. Population control is primarily interested in fertility rates. ‘Future population growth is highly dependent on the path that future fertility will take, as relatively small changes in fertility behaviour, when projected over several decades, can generate large differences in total population.’1 Population control is defined in this book as a policy regime designed to modify fertility trends through deliberate interference in reproductive behaviour, with the aim of influencing demographic outcomes. The total fertility rate (TFR) is the crucial variable here: in simplified terms, it refers to the average number of children a woman will bear over her lifetime. Over time, replacement-level TFR (of 2.1) results in a stable population as each generation replaces itself. To modify the TFR, population controllers must influence individuals’ reproductive behaviour. This is not just a complicated undertaking; it is also profoundly controversial. Liberal values of freedom, autonomy and human rights are entangled here with contested definitions of sexuality, gender roles and identities, family norms and embodiment, as well as with ideological disputes over the role of the state and its powers.
Migration, finally, is a somewhat different demographic phenomenon since it refers to the mobility of existing peoples. Migration can nonetheless affect local fertility and death rates. Some environmentalists and security experts warn that increasing numbers may themselves cause mass migrations or life-threatening conflicts. Because of migration’s national impact on other demographic variables, immigration and emigration are widely used as policy levers to address perceived size or age imbalances. Regulating people’s movement, especially by enforcing national border controls, is both common and contested, although this is not conventionally understood as population control.
The concept of population control contains an ambiguity that is reflected in the book’s organization: it refers to both ends and means. Ends concern demographic outcomes and associated ambitions to manage them, in order to achieve collective benefits (for the planet and its wildlife, for all or some humans, for future generations). This consequentialist approach is discussed in chapter 1. The question of population control as a matter of means, on the other hand, is both interwoven with and logically separate from disagreements about goals. Hostility to population control may stem from a belief that government meddling with private reproductive behaviour in pursuit of demographic ends is inherently coercive and thus illegitimate, irrespective of the merits of the ends pursued. This ethical objection is examined in chapter 2. For other critics, the issue is more practical: regardless of any benefits population policies might bestow on the commons, they doubt there are fair, non-coercive means for pursuing them. This policy dimension is considered in chapter 3.
The book’s title is intentionally provocative. By asking ‘Should we control world population?’, it aims to present a highly controversial topic in a bold and unvarnished way, acknowledging that each term within the question – population, control, we – contributes to its controversial reputation. The concept of population is a modern construction born – as Michel Foucault explains – of unprecedented population growth triggered by European development from around 1750, of new statistical techniques capable of aggregating bio-demographic data and measuring trends, of novel (biopolitical) micro-powers capable of permeating and reconstructing everyday habits, of modern states that colonize these techniques and use them to discipline behaviour, of classical political economy’s interest in maintaining a productive labour force. Whether contemporary public policy should continue to focus on this aggregated, structural level or on a more micro-level of households and personal choice; whether nations can or should still think of their citizens as a population, given their diversity; whether the numerous but often invisible biopolitical interventions that have become normal features of governance are justifiable: these remain lively questions for critical inquiry.
The idea of control is no less politically contentious. Controlling the natural forces that yield bio-demographic phenomena, for example through birth control or disease control, seems congruent with a modern desire to dominate nature through science and action, as a precondition for rational government and personal liberty. Biological connotations of pest control, or political associations with authoritarianism, seem more sinister. The two most familiar examples of population control programmes – China’s one-child policy (1979–2016) and the compulsory sterilizations undertaken in India, especially during its State of Emergency (1975–7) – are notorious. Whether they can be justified by their demographic outcomes, and whether any state can legitimately interfere with private family decisions even if it renounces coercive means, raises profound political and ethical questions that are not readily resolved.
This normative terrain is further complicated by new models of governing. During the 1980s, objections that population control is an unjustifiable invasion of privacy became entangled with political rejections of top-down, centralized planning regimes. The ‘command-and-control’ model that was conducive to managing demographic trends, and the bureaucratic welfare programmes that were congenial to providing comprehensive, goal-driven family planning services, have been displaced by models of decentralized governance associated with neoliberal preferences for privatized risks and services. As political conceptions of individual freedom mesh with economic notions of rational personal choice, definitions of coercion and voluntary consent become less clear-cut. On the other hand, whether it is by a liberal model of government that privileges human rights, or by a neoliberal model of governance that privileges market forces over state action, population control has been reframed by a starker opposition between individual freedom (or choice) and (coercive) state control than was formerly the case. This dichotomy is challenged at several points in the following chapters.
The we, finally, poses some particularly intractable political difficulties since it concerns the distribution of power and the identity of the agents who would exert control (or comprise their targets). Do governments have the right to tell (some?) people how many children they may bear when the common good is at stake? Conversely, do couples have a responsibility to take into account the effects on other people, future generations and different species of their procreation? If so, do rulers (or experts) have a role in educating or advising them, and does the public also have a part to play in debating population policies?
The ‘we’ provokes additional geopolitical critiques, given regional disparities in which uneven demographic trends map onto unequal development. If the planet is unsustainably peopled, who is responsible? Who should act? Some critics challenge the idea of a tragedy of the commons shared by all current and future generations of humans (and other species). In particular, they may reject the blanket suggestion that fewer people are needed to avoid environmental collapse or global injustice, especially if this ignores the diverse contributions and responsibilities of different regions. Given the demographic and economic disparities between the global North and South, and their disproportionate contributions to population growth and environmental degradation, they equate the idea of a worldwide population problem with neo-colonial sophistry. Indeed, some critics deny that a problem of overpopulation exists at all, especially inasmuch as this casts blame on the high-fertility nations of the less developed world, and attribute responsibility for environmental unsustainability entirely to overconsumption in wealthy countries.
Yet others are wary of reducing the ‘we’ to western interests since this both denies agency to poor countries and neglects adverse effects of rapid population growth on their own interests in development. From a demographic perspective, it seems pragmatic to concentrate on helping regions where population growth is most evident, especially if this impedes their aspirations to eliminate poverty. The principal locus of concern has shifted since the late twentieth century from Asia (with its populous nations and now emergent economies) to Africa (where most least developed countries are situated). ‘In all plausible scenarios of future trends, Africa will play a central role in shaping the size and distribution of the world’s population over the next few decades.’2 Yet focusing attention on fertility reduction here provokes accusations of racism and eugenics, a charge exemplified by Hardt and Negri’s assertion that it is ‘difficult to separate most contemporary projects of population control from a kind of racial panic’.3 The intersection of causality, blame and interests marks one of the most politically combustible arenas in population disputes.
It could plausibly be argued, however, that it is wealthier nations that are most overpopulated since they have exceeded the capacity of their territories to support their biophysical needs and their members individually make disproportionate claims on world resources. Perhaps, then, it is richer peoples who must assume the responsibilities of the ‘we’ in limiting their own numbers as well as curtailing their consumption. In this case, what are the responsibilities of emergent economies like China and India (whose 2.7 billion people comprise 37 per cent of the 2017 world population), with their millions of new middle-class consumers and degraded environments? Such questions imply that any renewed debate about world population will need to recognize both the diverse material conditions in which overpopulation occurs (which no longer devolve easily into global North versus South) and a shared (but differentiated) contribution to planetary harm. These are extremely challenging issues, but what they indicate is the importance of reassessing assumptions about the ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘them’ in a world where demographics, geopolitics and environmental indicators are changing yet inseparable.
Rephrasing the main question in the passive voice – should world population be controlled? – apparently avoids the problem of the ‘we’ by presenting an objective choice: as inhabitants of the global commons, do we not share a collective interest in controlling our aggregate numbers? This is a legitimate question and, as with climate change, it is in principle feasible to imagine building an international consensus supported by a network of transnational organizations that endorse an overarching discourse compatible with universal human rights. Something like the latter indeed exists, in the form of the so-called ‘Cairo consensus’: the dominant population discourse since 1994, when it emerged from the UN’s International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD). The core of the paradigm shift Cairo represented is, however, a rejection of the ‘numbers game’ and policies associated with it (that is, of neo-Malthusian reproductive policies whose primary rationale is to halt population growth), and their replacement by a reproductive rights framework. For some current demographers and environmentalists, including climate scientists, the aim is to restore an international political commitment to stabilizing world population (without compromising voluntarism or rights) through the development of a new framework for population policies. Supportive data and empirical evidence abound; it is their political and ethical framework that awaits construction.
One thing is clear: any such constructive undertaking must be located in the material and geopolitical context of the twenty-first century, including its new models of governance and demographic trends. Yet it is unlikely to succeed unless it includes a critical reappraisal of previous population disputes and assessments of their current relevance. This latter genealogy is too complicated to explore in detail here, but the key point is that, during the post-war decades, population matters often served as a proxy or vehicle for wider conflicts (Cold War East/West hostilities; left/right ideological struggles; post-colonial animosities between the global North and South; the febrile politics of gender, race and class; the legacy of eugenics programmes). It is because they continue to cast a long shadow that we need to reassess inherited positions, while finding new ways to think about the interfaces between politics and population. This short book tries to do justice to this multifaceted approach. It identifies outstanding political and ethical questions but asks, in particular, whether ‘population control’ can be morally and empirically justified.