The Changing Discourse on Population and Development: Toward a New Political Demography

Abstract

The United Nations (UN) Millennium Project is an independent advisory body commissioned by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to advise the United Nations on strategies for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)–the set of internationally agreed-upon targets for reducing poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation, and discrimination against women by 2015. The Millennium Project presented its findings to the Secretary General in January of 2005 in a report entitled Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals. The report is expected to play a central role in the high-level Summit of the UN General Assembly on the Millennium Development Goals in September 2005. The March 2005 issue of Studies included a commentary by Barbara Crossette that addressed the question of why the Millennium Development Goals do not include a reproductive health goal. In this special section, six scholars and policymakers in the fields of population and reproductive health reflect on the context, scope, and significance of the treatment of reproductive health and rights within the Millennium Development Goals. The opening commentary from Stan Bernstein, a participant in the UN Millennium Project, provides historical context. In the four alphabetically arranged essays that follow, Alaka Malwade Basu, Mahmoud Fathalla, Adrienne Germain and Ruth Dixon-Mueller, and Steven W. Sinding offer critical analyses of the MDG-reproductive health nexus. Included after the commentaries are three excerpts from the full report of the Millennium Project and a chapter from a Millennium Project Task Force report calling for the guarantee of sexual and reproductive health and rights. All of the Millennium Project documents can be found at 〈http://www.unmillenniumproject.org〉.