The Political Economy of Family Planning: Population Dynamics and Contraceptive Markets

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article explores recent changes in international development policy with regard to population and reproductive health and connects these to contemporary dynamics in contraceptive markets, taking the German government and the pharmaceutical company Bayer HealthCare as an example. While the vocabulary of individual reproductive rights remains ever‐present, governments in the global South — and in Africa in particular — are currently encouraged to manage their ‘human capital’ in the light of population age composition and available resources. More than 20 years after the Cairo Conference on population and development, key documents and budgets evidence a discursive and financial shift once again towards more explicitly neo‐Malthusian approaches and stand‐alone family planning. At the same time, a return to formerly discredited long‐acting reversible contraception is evident in major public–private partnerships of governments, companies and NGOs. Drawing on policy papers, interviews and statistical data, this article finds considerable interplay between a reoriented development policy under the name of ‘population dynamics’ and the interests of pharmaceutical companies in contraceptive markets.