Between Continuity and Change: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development’s Program of Action

Sammanfattning: The history of the population control movement is one replete with controversies and where narratives about coercive population control policies and programs abound. Questionable practices such as the wide sterilization campaigns as took place in India during its state of emergency period in the 1970s or the use of contraceptives in the developing world already banned from Western markets contributed in casting a shadow over the population control movement for years. It is in this context that we need to understand the Cairo International conference on Population and Development of 1994, which, many claimed was an important paradigm shift that served to re-define the population issue and change the course of the population debate. The Program of Action firmly established the primacy of human welfare needs over a “simple” concern with demographic targets and goals. For activists and commentators alike, a consensus was reached at Cairo and the conference represented a complete break from the international population movement’s controversial past. However, this has led to the misconceived assumption that the debate on population control is now “dead and buried” (Brigham, 2012). Hence, some authors argue that the public and global interest in the issue of overpopulation has for some time been on decline. The argument of this paper is however that the consensus reached at Cairo happened less through a change in perspective than by finding a language that was so vague as to allow a coalition by a variety of actors with divergent interests, between women’s rights advocates, population control advocates, religious groups, market-oriented economists, environmentalists, etc. Through a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the Program of Action, the paper suggests that it is important to see the Program of Action not as a complete break from the population control movement but as a continuation of the same discourse albeit in a changed political context, and, family planning has now become the vehicle through which the old population control discourse is legitimized and lives on.