The Politics of Family Planning in Asia

Nearly one-third of the world's people live in East and Southeast Asia, a large portion of them in poverty, dependent on intensive agriculture, and living under development-oriented, authoritarian regimes. Central to the social and economic well-being of these people is the stabilization of population levels through family planning. This book charts the successes and failures of such programmes, focusing on the political debates surrounding their implementation in China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. Its major theme is that population policies must be understood within the broader context of a nation's political and social policies, and against the background of heterogeneous national cultures. This focus on politics - and hence on ideology, bureaucracy and intra-national conflicts - provides a novel theoretical base for the study of family planning; it also helps to explain why particular programme innovations or plans succeed in some settings, but prove irrelevant or unwelcome in others.