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Population Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Caseof Both Normative and Coercive Ties to the WorldPolity
Rachel Sullivan Robinson
Received: 15 October 2012 / Accepted: 26 May 2014
� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
Abstract During the 1980s and 1990s, two-thirds of sub-Saharan African coun-
tries adopted national population policies to reduce population growth. Based on
multivariate statistical analysis, I show that countries with more ties to the world
polity were more likely to adopt population policies. In order to refine world polity
theory, however, I distinguish between normative and coercive ties to the world
polity. I show that ties to the world polity via international nongovernmental
organizations became predictive of population policy adoption only after the 1994
United Nations International Conference on Population and Development institu-
tionalized reproductive health as a global norm to which countries could show
adherence through population policies. Ties to the World Bank in the form of
indebtedness, presumed to be coercive, were associated with population policy
adoption throughout the time period observed. Gross domestic product per capita,
democracy, and religion also all predicted population policy adoption. The case of
population policy adoption in sub-Saharan Africa thus demonstrates that ties to
organizations likely to exert normative pressure are most influential when some-
thing about international norms is at stake, while ties to organizations with coercive
capacity matter regardless of time, but may be easier for wealthier countries to
resist.
Keywords Population policy � Sub-Saharan Africa � Institutionalism �International Conference on Population and Development �International nongovernmental organizations
R. S. Robinson (&)
School of International Service, American University, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, NW,
Washington, DC 20016-8071, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
123
Popul Res Policy Rev
DOI 10.1007/s11113-014-9338-5
Introduction
What determines when and whether countries adopt policies? Research across a
variety of disciplines tells us that policies are not the result of a simple cost-benefit
analysis where the policy adopted is the one that costs the least, helps the most
people, or has the greatest evidentiary base (Nathanson 1996; Wedel et al. 2005;
Yanow 1996). Instead, countries adopt policies in response to both local
constituencies and global considerations and for reasons that often appear far from
rational. In particular, neo-institutionalist scholars have found that countries’
differential levels of embeddedness in the world polity—the global set of
organizations, beliefs, and values that reflect much of modernity—are often
strongly associated with state-level behavior (e.g., Frank et al. 2000; Meyer et al.
1977; Simmons and Elkins 2004; True and Mintrom 2001). These scholars
frequently operationalize ties to the world polity by the number of international
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that have either individual or organiza-
tional members in a country, and argue that such ties transmit norms about the
appropriate ways for nations to behave, thus driving much policy behavior (Boli and
Thomas 1997; Meyer 2004).
To refine world polity theory, it is necessary to better understand when global
norms are most influential to national-level behavior, and when ties to the world
polity might actually coerce countries into behaving in particular ways. This article
thus uses the case of population policy adoption in sub-Saharan Africa—where
during the 1980s and 1990s two-thirds of countries announced national population
policies to reduce population growth—to tease out when norms matter most to state-
level behavior, to theorize and demonstrate the influence of coercive and normative
pressure on policy adoption, and to assess the relative role of country-level
characteristics in policy adoption. Understanding the policy response to high
fertility in sub-Saharan African countries is more than an academic exercise. In
these countries, women have on average five children in their lifetimes, so lowering
fertility is key to reducing the world’s highest levels of maternal mortality and thus
meeting Millennium Development Goal Five, and will strongly influence global
population size in coming years (Ahmed et al. 2012; Population Reference Bureau
2013; United Nations 2011).
The general conclusion of world polity research is that above and beyond
national characteristics, countries have adopted policies in response to the world
polity (Schneiberg and Clemens 2006). Scholars working from this perspective have
shown the influence of ties to the world polity on economic policies (Henisz et al.
2005; Macpherson 2006; Macpherson and Weymouth 2012; Simmons et al. 2006;
Simmons and Elkins 2004), environmental policies, laws, and ministries (Frank
et al. 2000; Matisoff 2008), educational systems (Meyer et al. 1977, 1992), human
rights treaty ratification (Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui 2005), women’s suffrage
(Ramirez et al. 1997), and bureaucracies for gender mainstreaming (True and
Mintrom 2001). World polity scholars often cite the fact that few countries fully
implement policies, a so-called decoupling between intent and action, as evidence
that those policies were adopted primarily to achieve externally oriented symbolic
goals (Meyer et al. 1997; Meyer and Jepperson 2000).
R. S. Robinson
123
Previous research on population policy adoption has similarly found a strong
explanatory role for the world polity (Barrett 1995; Barrett and Frank 1999; Barrett
et al. 2010). Because this previous research covered policy adoption only through
1990, it necessarily excluded the majority of population policy adoptions in sub-
Saharan Africa, which occurred after that date. This article thus expands the
geographic scope of research on population policy, and through an event history
analysis with cross-national data makes two additional contributions to our
understanding of how ties to the world polity influence policy adoption. First, I
show that normative ties to the world polity through international NGOs became a
significant predictor of population policy adoption only after the United Nations
International Conference on Population and Development in 1994. This conference
institutionalized the right to reproductive health,1 and I argue motivated countries
without population policies to adopt them as a means to show adherence to global
norms about women’s rights. Second, I provide evidence for the role of coercive ties
to the world polity in state-level policy behavior: the World Bank both promoted
population policy and, as a major creditor, had significant leverage over most
African countries. Across time, characteristics of countries, specifically wealth,
democracy, and religion, were also significantly associated with policy adoption.
Following a brief background on population policy, the paper uses the existing
literature as well as the experiences of particular African countries with population
policy to develop three arguments for the drivers of population policy adoption
(normative pressure, coercive pressure, and the desire for socioeconomic develop-
ment) and then examines the arguments statistically using cross-national data for all
sub-Saharan African countries.
Background
A population policy is a national policy approved by a country’s government, called
a ‘population’ policy, which aims to purposively alter the size, structure, or
geographic distribution of a country’s population (cf. May 2012). In the case of sub-
Saharan Africa, these policies have focused predominantly on reducing population
growth rates, lowering mortality levels, and shifting the urban–rural population
distribution. The texts of African population policies are quite similar and derive
primarily from reference documents resulting from international and regional
conferences on population, reflecting their origins in the world polity (Barrett et al.
2010; Meyer et al. 1997). The policies generally start with a broad statement about
the relationship between population factors and development and well-being, are
followed by a discussion of the demographic and economic situation of the country,
present policy objectives and strategies, and conclude with a description of the
institutional structures for implementing the policies as well as plans for monitoring
and evaluation.
1 According to the World Health Organization (2012), reproductive health ‘implies that people are able
to have a responsible, satisfying and safe sex life and that they have the capability to reproduce and the
freedom to decide if, when and how often to do so.’ Access to family planning is a vital aspect of
reproductive health.
Population Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa
123
The first countries in sub-Saharan Africa to announce population policies were
Kenya in 1967 and Ghana in 1969 (Caldwell and Sai 2007; Chimbwete et al. 2005;
Locoh and Makdessi 1996). Following these early declarations, no new policies
were adopted for almost 20 years until Kenya announced a revised policy in 1986
and Nigeria, Senegal, and Liberia adopted policies in 1988 (Harvard School of
Public Health 1988–1996/1997; United Nations Population Fund and Population
Reference Bureau 2003). This trend continued through 1999, with 27 additional
countries adopting new policies, and Ghana revising its 1969 policy. Since then, no
country without a policy has announced a new one, although countries have revised
extant policies. Table 1 describes this process year-by-year and lists the 15 sub-
Saharan countries without population policies in the note. Although the impact of
population policies is beyond the scope of this paper, previous research shows that
countries that adopted population policies received, on average, more funding from
the United States Agency for International Development (Barrett and Tsui 1999). In
addition, countries with population policies experienced statistically greater fertility
declines between 1987 and 2002 than those without such policies: 21 % compared
to 14 % (author’s calculations from World Bank (2009)).
There are three arguments for why African countries adopted population policies.
First, ties to the world polity may have transmitted norms about the importance of
human rights in general, and the linkage between population and development
(Barrett 1995; Barrett and Frank 1999; Barrett et al. 2010). Second, coercive
pressure from international organizations may have been the primary driver (e.g.,
Connelly 2006; Hartmann 1995; Liagin 1996). Third, a rational desire by
governments to slow population growth in order to foster socioeconomic
development (e.g., Chamie 1994; Lacey 1990; Nassim and Sai 1990) may have
led to the adoption of population policies. I present each of these arguments below,
illustrating with examples from the population policies themselves and particularly
from the cases of Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria. I then turn to testing the relative
weight of the three arguments for population policy adoption in the statistical
analysis.
Population Policy Via Normative Pressure
The existing cross-national research on population policy by Barrett and colleagues
(Barrett 1995; Barrett and Frank 1999; Barrett et al. 2010) draws strongly from a
world polity perspective and shows how a belief among the global community that
rapid population growth had negative implications for socioeconomic growth was
transmitted to developing countries via international population conferences and
demographic training programs. From this perspective, population policies were the
result of ‘coreless’ diffusion, whereby the first actor to adopt an innovation is not
actually the actor who created it (Barrett et al. 2010).2 Technocratic policy elites,
who participated in these conferences and were often educated abroad, helped make
2 Even if core countries do not have population policies to mimic, they have small families and are
wealthy, suggesting that smaller families could lead to greater wealth. Thornton et al. (2012) describe
such ‘‘developmental idealism’’ across countries. I thank an anonymous reviewer for making this point.
R. S. Robinson
123
population policies a reality in their home countries (Thomas and Grindle 1994), as
was the case in Kenya and Malawi (Chimbwete et al. 2005), and also in Nigeria
(Robinson 2012).
There is little doubt that ties to the world polity have influenced population policy
adoption. There is good reason, however, to probe more deeply into when a
population policy would be most likely to serve externally valued goals. Such an
opportunity emerged in 1994 when population policy became a way to express
allegiance to international norms related to human (reproductive) rights. The United
Nations hosted three major, decennial international population conferences between
1974 and 1994. Each of these conferences produced a document intended to serve as
a point of reference on population for governments and international organizations,
with the Program of Action from the 1994 conference serving that function through
2014 (McIntosh and Finkle 1995). For those countries that had not yet adopted a
population policy by 1994, I argue that the conference provided extra motivation to
do so by institutionalizing the concept of reproductive health as a human right and
making population policy a way to show support for that norm.
Table 1 Timing of adoption of population policies in sub-Saharan Africa, 1967–1999
Year Country Annual
frequency
Cumulative
frequency
Cumulative
percentage
1967 Kenya (first policy) 1 – –
1969 Ghana (first policy) 1 – –
1986 Kenya (revised policy) 1 1 2.1
1988 Liberia, Senegal, Nigeria 3 4 8.5
1989 Sierra Leone, Zambia 2 6 12.8
1990 Madagascar, Rwanda 2 8 17.0
1991 Burkina Faso, Mali 2 10 21.3
1992 Cameroon, Gambia, Guinea, Niger, Tanzania 5 15 31.9
1993 Ethiopia 1 16 34.0
1994 Chad, Ghana (revised policy) Malawi, Lesotho 4 20 42.6
1995 Cape Verde, Mauritania, Uganda 3 23 48.9
1996 Benin 1 24 51.1
1997 Botswana, Cote d’Ivoire, Namibia 3 27 57.4
1998 Central African Republic, South Africa, Togo,
Zimbabwe
4 31 66.0
1999 Mozambique 1 32 68.1
Total 32
The two earliest countries to adopt population policies, Kenya and Ghana, are included in the analysis
presented in this paper using the dates of adoption for their revised policies. The denominator for the
cumulative percentage is 47, although two countries did not exist as sovereign states until after 1986
(Namibia in 1990 and Eritrea in 1993). States that have never adopted population policies include Angola,
Burundi, Comoros, Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea,
Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritius, Sao Tome and Principe, Somalia, Sudan, and Swaziland
Source: Author’s data (see text for details)
Population Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa
123
The global norm of reproductive health rights symbolized by the 1994 conference
signaled an end to the era of population control (Eager 2004; Hodgson and Watkins
1997; McIntosh and Finkle 1995). Although the previous two world population
conferences had produced documents well within the framework of human rights,
the 1994 Cairo Program of Action signed by 179 countries (including all countries
from sub-Saharan Africa) emphasized rights to a greater degree than ever before.
The institutionalization of reproductive health as a global norm at Cairo, the fact
that there was no associated reproductive health treaty that countries could sign, and
the implication in the Program of Action that population policies were a desirable
outcome (Findlay and Borgegard 1995; United Nations 1995) suggest that
population policy adoption after the conference became a means to show allegiance
to international norms. And indeed, when comparing the policies written before and
after the conference, there is a steady increase in the number of mentions of ‘rights.’
Those adopted after 1994 mention rights on average 8.8 times per policy, while
those adopted before 1994 mention rights only 6.4 times.3
Population Policy Via Coercive Pressure
World polity interpretations of policy adoption by developing countries have
downplayed the coercive aspects of ties to the global community (see True and
Mintrom (2001) for a good discussion). Although research emphasizing normative
diffusion notes the importance of power differentials (Henisz et al. 2005; Simmons
et al. 2006) and there is excellent research showing inequality in the world polity
(Beckfield 2008, 2010; Hughes et al. 2009; Smith and Wiest 2005), research in this
tradition has tended to privilege normative over coercive force. There is good
reason, however, to suspect coercion played a role in population policy adoption in
sub-Saharan African countries given African countries’ relative disadvantage in
negotiations with donors committed to population reduction, and the presence of
high fertility norms that made population policy domestically risky.
Some scholars have claimed that international organizations leveraged the
distribution of aid to force developing country governments to implement
population policies (Connelly 2006; Hartmann 1995; Liagin 1996). While direct
coercion is difficult to prove, there is little doubt that international organizations
strongly promoted population policy in developing countries (e.g., Demeny 2011),
and in Africa in particular during the 1980s. Globally, the World Bank most
emphasized the impact of population growth on economic development during the
1970s and early 1980s (Fair 2008). Because of structural adjustment programs, the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the 1980s had a high degree of
leverage in most sub-Saharan African countries. In particular, the Bank’s
involvement in population-related activities on the continent accelerated at that
same time (Gibbon 1992; Mosley and Branic 1989; Sinding 1991). The United
States Agency for International Development also believed slowing population
3 Difference is significant at the p \ 0.10 level using a one-tailed t test. The increase in the number of
references to rights reflects other research in the world polity tradition which notes that national-level
policies reflect global cultural norms at the time of adoption (cf. Boli (1987) on constitutions).
R. S. Robinson
123
growth was a necessary precursor to economic development, and in the 1980s
funded the Futures Group to develop a series of presentations for a number of
countries—including many in sub-Saharan Africa—detailing the negative impacts
of population growth on the economy, health care system, schools, and beyond.
These presentations, called Resources for the Awareness of Population Impacts on
Development (RAPID), were given to policymakers and other leaders (Hartmann
1995) and are still used today.
Qualitative accounts of policy adoption in individual countries confirm the
importance of international organizations in the creation and adoption of these
policies. Kenya adopted a population policy in 1967 that was a near copy of the
report of the Population Council’s recent visit there (Chimbwete et al. 2005; Frank
and McNicoll 1987; Warwick 1982). Richey (2008) describes Tanzania’s 1992
population policy as resulting in part from international donors, including the
United Nations Population Fund, the World Bank, the International Labor
Organization, and the Economic Commission for Africa. International organiza-
tions, particularly the World Bank, were also implicated in policy adoptions in
Senegal and Nigeria (Robinson 2012; Sai and Chester 1990; World Bank 1992).
Finally, almost half of the population policy documents themselves mention
international organizations as funding preparatory meetings, outreach, and/or
publication efforts related to each policy.
That donor organizations promoted population policy, however, does not imply
that the process was entirely coercive. Adopting otherwise unsavory population
policies may have served as an act of extraversion (Bayart 2000), a strategy
whereby African leaders used their country’s disadvantageous global status to
procure resources from foreign donors. In Nigeria, adopting a policy assuaged the
World Bank’s concerns about the management of demographic growth to protect
socioeconomic development and was followed by major loans and grants from the
World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development (Liagin
1996; Sai and Chester 1990; World Bank 1991). It also formed part of a larger
political restructuring process that General Babangida, then head of state, used to
show to donors and citizens alike that Nigeria was indeed on a return path to
democracy (Robinson 2012). Tanzania and Kenya also strategically deployed
population policy in their relationships with donors. Richey (1999, 2003, 2008)
describes the Tanzanian government’s ‘strategically ambivalent’ stance on popu-
lation growth and population policy as a means to balance the competing interests of
international donors, who were in favor of population policy, and local political and
religious groups, who were against it. In Kenya, President Kenyatta put aside his
personal objection to family planning and facilitated the adoption of the 1967
population policy in part because it brought money for family planning that the
government could redirect toward maternal and child health care (Chimbwete et al.
2005). As in Nigeria, the Kenyan policy led to increased donor financing
(Chimbwete et al. 2005; Hodgson and Watkins 1997). And in many countries,
the policy explicitly referred to financing from donors, as in Benin: ‘The National
Commission on Human Resources and Population and its decentralized bodies will
attend to… the mobilization of development partners for their support for
population programs’ (Republic of Benin 1996: 99–100). Thus, although donor
Population Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa
123
organizations promoted population policy and had significant leverage over African
countries because of levels of debt and a continuing need for aid, African countries
simultaneously had good reason to suspect that policy adoption would lead to the
procurement of financial resources and may have manipulated and/or played along
with donors accordingly.
Population Policy to Improve Socioeconomic Development
Demographers and practitioners have described population policies as the result of
governments ‘realizing’ that they needed to slow population growth in order to
ensure socioeconomic development (Chamie 1994; Lacey 1990; Nassim and Sai
1990). According to this perspective, throughout the 1960s and 70s, relatively
robust economic growth, a desire to achieve economies of scale through large
populations, and norms favoring high fertility meant that most African governments
watched their populations grow with ‘quiet satisfaction’ (Mabogunje and Arowolo
1978: 44 as cited in Miro and Potter 1980). Improvements in well-being for most
Africans following independence in the 1960s were, however, short lived. The oil
crisis and a sharp decline in the availability of foreign exchange in the late 1970s,
combined with falling prices of primary goods during the 1980s, hit African
economies hard (Bryceson 2012; Clapham 1996). As a result, and as Fig. 1 shows,
during the 1980s, sub-Saharan African countries experienced negative gross
domestic product (GDP) per capita growth on average and did not fully recover
positive per capita GDP growth rates until after the mid-1990s. Population growth
contributed mathematically to this negative GDP per capita growth: the average
population growth rate across all sub-Saharan African countries in the 1980s was
2.9 % per year (World Bank 2009), implying population sizes would double in just
25 years.
All African population policies reflected a desire to improve well-being, and
particularly economic well-being. Indeed, of the 25 policies for which the text could
be located, all but one policy was adopted by the Ministry of Planning, the
bureaucracy charged with economic and financial matters.4 The primary objective
of all African population policies was to improve the quality of life of the
population through increased socioeconomic development, as well as reduced
mortality, decreased unemployment, slower urban–rural migration, and increased
education. As Botswana’s policy described it, ‘The policy addresses the major
concerns and issues critical to the growth, structure and characteristics of our
population and provides strategies to influence them in a manner conducive to the
attainment of sustainable human development’ (Republic of Botswana 1997:
foreword). And in Mali, ‘The Government should adopt measures to ensure… a
balance between population growth and the process of socio-economic develop-
ment’ (Government of Mali 1991: para 2.2.1). On a lighter note, Cameroon’s policy
proposed improvements to well-being more broadly defined: ‘Concerned with the
balanced and harmonious development of all aspects of the population, the national
4 The missing policies are predominantly from French-speaking countries, which is not by design, but an
anomaly of the historical record. The remaining policy (Nigeria’s) was adopted by the Ministry of Health.
R. S. Robinson
123
population policy will stress the improvement of the physical and psychic wellbeing
of Cameroonians by: the promotion of sports; the development of cultural activities;
the promotion of local tourism; the restructuring of leisure time; the promotion of
culture (such as the music and painting)’ (Republic of Cameroon 1993: 44).
At face value, then, population policies were clearly framed as means to improve
socioeconomic, human, and overall development, suggesting that poorer countries
would be more likely to adopt them. Because African leaders were under pressure
from both citizens and lenders to improve socioeconomic well-being, and although
adopting a population policy in no way guaranteed the promised positive outcomes,
adopting one looked like concrete action to both citizens and lenders. Furthermore, a
population policy was a convenient opportunity to deflect blame for poor economic
performance away from the government, making population growth the scapegoat.
Reconciling Arguments
There are thus three arguments for when and whether sub-Saharan African countries
adopted population policies. The first (Hypothesis 1) is that population policy is the
result of countries’ differential ties to organizations, particularly international
NGOs, through which norms related to human rights flowed. Based on global trends
in thinking about reproductive rights, I hypothesize that such normative pressure
was influential in African countries only after the 1994 International Conference on
0.0
1.0
2.0
3.0
4.0
5.0
6.0
1960
1962
1964
1966
1968
1970
1972
1974
1976
1978
1980
1982
1984
1986
1988
1990
1992
1994
1996
1998
2000
2002
2004
2006
2008
Mea
n C
ount
ry A
nnua
l Gro
wth
Rat
e (%
)
Year
Mean Annual Population Growth Rate (w.out Rwanda)
Mean GDP Growth (five-year moving average)
Fig. 1 Mean national economic and demographic growth rates, sub-Saharan African Countries,1960–2008Note: Population growth rate excludes Rwanda because of extreme values (both positive and negative)during the 1990s. Source: World Bank (2009)
Population Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa
123
Population and Development institutionalized reproductive health as a human right
and turned population policies into a vehicle to show commitment to that norm. The
second argument is that population policy is the result of coercive pressure from
lender organizations (Hypothesis 2). Whether policy adoption was due to coercive
pressure, or was the result of extraversion on the part of African leaders cannot be
identified statistically, although qualitative studies provide support for both
interpretations. The third argument is that countries with higher rates of population
growth and lower rates of economic growth were more likely to adopt population
policies (Hypothesis 3). Whether they did so in the hopes that the policies would
slow population growth and improve socioeconomic development, or because doing
so was strategically beneficial in managing state-donor relationships is impossible to
discern statistically.
These three arguments for policy adoption are, of course, not mutually exclusive.
Ties to the World Bank and ties to international NGOs are both ties to the world
polity. And as the qualitative examples demonstrate, there is more driving policy
adoption than external pressure, be it normative or coercive, much of which is very
difficult to operationalize for the purpose of cross-national statistical analyses.
African countries, and poor countries in general, can and do act in their own interest
to procure resources from donors and manage relationships with more powerful
countries, even in the presence of extreme power imbalances. National-level actors
can ‘localize’ international norms (Acharya 2004), as well as assert agency over
policy processes through a variety of mechanisms (Fourcade-Gourinchas and Babb
2002). Population policy also presented states with a means to potentially deepen
state–society relationships by convincing people that they, and not the leaders of
ethnic and religious subgroups, could set the rules for how people should behave
(Migdal 2001). For example, many population policies referred to guidelines for
marriage and numbers of children. In Liberia, the policy read, ‘Programs shall be
introduced to extend and improve the registration of births, deaths and marriages to
cover the whole country’ (Republic of Liberia 1988: 18), and in Ghana, a stated
purpose of the policy was ‘to educate the youth on population matters which directly
affect them… in order to guide them towards responsible parenthood and small
family sizes’ (Republic of Ghana 1994: para. 4.3.7). And in The Gambia, the policy
stated, ‘A strategy is needed to modify cultural influences so as to promote the
attainment of the goals of the population policy’ (Republic of The Gambia 1992:
30). Thus, while the analysis below tests three specific hypotheses about ties to the
world polity as well as measurable internal characteristics, a broader set of factors
was certainly also at play.
Data and Methods
The data set includes observations starting from 1984, the year in which developing
countries, including many in Africa, indicated at the international population
conference in Mexico City that they had become more open to family planning (see
statements in Sadik (1991)). This date thus marks the beginning of the period in
which an African country could be expected to consider adopting a population
R. S. Robinson
123
policy, and also coincides with the era of increasingly intense World Bank
involvement in sub-Saharan Africa through structural adjustment. The data are
censored at 2003, 5 years after the last policy adoption in 1999. Table 2 includes
descriptive statistics for all variables in the analysis.
Year of Population Policy Adoption
The dependent variable, year of national population policy adoption, comes from
the various population documents themselves, the Annual Review of Population
Law (1988–1996/1997) and the United Nations Population Fund and Population
Reference Bureau publication Country Profiles for Population and Reproductive
Health: Policy Developments and Indicators (2003, 2005). This variable differs
somewhat from the information that comes from the biennial United Nations
publication World Population Policies (United Nations 2007) used in much
previous research (e.g., Barrett 1995; Barrett and Frank 1999; Barrett et al. 2010;
Barrett and Tsui 1999) as it refers specifically to national population policies, and
not to other documents such as development plans that include provisions about
population growth. Thus, the United Nations data conflate different types of
documents and are not ideal for testing ideas about adoption of a document called a
‘population policy.’ The date of population policy adoption used in the analysis
below differs from that of the United Nations for slightly more than half of the
countries in sub-Saharan Africa. For approximately two-thirds of those differences,
the United Nations publication indicates an earlier date. Table 1 shows frequencies
for the population policy variable for the analysis below. Table 2 shows that among
countries included in the statistical analysis, approximately three quarters adopted
population policies and the average year of adoption was 1993.
Ties to the World Polity (Hypotheses 1 and 2)
To measure the extent of normative pressure, and to test Hypothesis 1, I use the
number of ties to international NGOs from each country. These data come from the
Yearbook of International Organizations (Union of International Associations 1985/
1986–2005/2006). I use the raw count of ties to such organizations, rather than a per
capita measure, on the grounds that messages about population policy would be
targeted toward the government, and not the general population, and each country
has only one government. Results using a per capita measure are, however,
substantively the same. I take the natural log of this variable to correct for skew. On
average, countries had a total of slightly more than 200 ties to such organizations.
To measure the leverage of donor organizations in a country, and thus the degree
of coercive pressure to test Hypothesis 2, I use the extent to which the World Bank
was involved in a country, measured by the balance of International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development loans and International Development Association
credits in a given year, expressed in constant 2000 US dollars (World Bank 2009).
Again, I use the total amount of loans, rather than a per capita measure, as this better
represents the degree to which the World Bank was vested in a particular country.
(Results using a per capita measure are, again, substantively the same.) I take the
Population Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa
123
natural log of this variable to correct for skew. The average annual balance for a
country over the observed time period was US$271.5 million.
Hypothesis 3 and Controls
A number of characteristics of countries themselves may have also influenced
population policy adoption. Population and GDP growth rates (World Bank 2009)
reflect Hypothesis 3, that countries with more rapidly growing populations and
slower-growing economies were more likely to adopt population policies, either to
improve socioeconomic development or as an act of extraversion to garner
resources from international donors. Average annual population growth rates and
GDP growth rates balanced each other out over the time period in question, at 2.7 %
per year.
The control variables for the analysis are also all internal characteristics of
countries. GDP per capita (World Bank 2009) reflects a variety of features of a
country, including its overall capacity, as well as the degree to which donors were
able to pressure the country. On average, GDP per capita was only slightly more
than US$600. I presume that government opinion that population growth was ‘too’
high in 1987 (Sadik 1991) was a necessary, although not sufficient, predictor of
policy adoption. Three-fifths of governments believed in 1987 that population
Table 2 Descriptive statistics, analysis of population policy adoption, sub-Saharan Africa, 1984–2003
Variable Min Max Mean SD N
Dependent variable
Adopted population policy 0.00 1.00 0.74 0.45 42
Year of population policy adoption 1986 1999 1993 3.52 42
World Polity Factors
Normative Pressure
International NGOs, ln of total 1.39 6.55 5.30 0.68 510
Coercive Pressure
World Bank involvement,
ln of total loans, and credits in US$2000
12.80 21.95 19.42 1.31 508
Internal Factors
Economic and Demographic Pressure
GDP growth rate (annual %) -28.10 23.60 2.72 5.63 512
Pop. growth rate (annual %) -0.20 6.05 2.72 0.85 512
Controls
GDP per capita, ln 4.39 10.27 6.41 0.94 512
Gov. believed pop. growth too high 1987 0.00 1.00 0.60 0.48 42
Catholic population (%) 0.00 95.90 24.63 23.65 42
Democracy -10.00 10.00 -3.42 5.65 500
Conflict indicator 0.00 1.00 0.22 0.42 512
NGO is nongovernmental organization; GDP is gross domestic product
Source: See text
R. S. Robinson
123
growth in their country was too high. Catholicism is the religion with the greatest
resistance to contraception, so countries with a high percentage of the population
that is Catholic (Bratton and van de Walle 1997) were presumably less likely to
adopt a population policy (Barrett et al. 2010). On average, 24 % of the population
in each country was Catholic, but this value ranged from 0 to 96 %. Democracy
comes from the Polity IV data set (Marshall et al. 2010) and measures the polity on
a score of -10 (complete autocracy) to ?10 (complete democracy). Leaders of
democracies may have been less likely (because they feared backlash from voters),
or more likely (because they had a greater investment in social welfare to which
voters held them accountable) to adopt population policies. African countries had an
average value of -3.42 for the polity measure during the time period examined,
indicating weak autocracy. Disruption and distraction caused by conflict presumably
made countries less likely to adopt population policies. Data on armed conflict come
from the International Peace Research Institute database (Harbom and Wallensteen
2009). For a country to be classified as having experienced an armed conflict in a
given year, armed force had to have been used between two parties, one of which
was the government of the state, and resulted in 25 or more battle-related deaths.
Countries in the data set were in conflict for slightly more than one-fifth of the years
observed.
Overall Data set and Analysis Technique
I make use of a binary variable to indicate whether an observation came from 1994
or later to create an interaction term in order to test Hypothesis 1, that the impact of
ties to international NGOs was more predictive of population policy adoption after
the 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development
that institutionalized reproductive health as a global norm and right.
There were 47 countries in sub-Saharan Africa by the end of 2003, of which 30
had adopted a new population policy since 1984. I include Kenya and Ghana’s
revised policies (adopted in 1986 and 1994, respectively) in the analysis on the
grounds that enough time had passed since these countries’ original policy
adoptions in the 1960s to make them again ‘at risk’ for adopting a policy.5 I exclude
Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Sao Tome and Principe, and Somalia due to large
amounts of missing data. I exclude South Africa for being an outlier in terms of
GDP and because it did not receive World Bank loans and credits during the time
period in question. In the end, the analysis includes a total of 42 countries of which
31 adopted policies: 16 before 1994, and 15 in 1994 or later. I lag the measures of
normative and coercive pressure, as well as the measures of population and GDP
growth, by 2 years in order to account for an approximate 1-year delay necessary to
obtain macroeconomic and population data, and a second, approximately 1-year
delay to react to it with policy.
5 The results of the analysis are substantively the same regardless of whether Kenya and Ghana are
included.
Population Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa
123
I present event history analysis results to examine which factors predict when
countries adopted population policies in a multivariate context. Specifically, I use
discrete-time methods because most of the data are available only yearly and
because such methods facilitate the management of tied data (years in which more
than one country adopted a policy). Discrete-time event-history analysis results in a
logistic regression of the following form:
logPit
1� Pitð Þ
� �¼ at þ b1xi þ b2zit ð1Þ
where Pit is the probability that country i adopts a population policy in year t given
that it has not already done so; a is a constant in year t; xi is a time-constant vector
of covariates for country i; zit is a time-varying vector of covariates for country i;
and b1 and b2 are vectors of effects describing xi and zit, respectively (Allison 1995).
Forty-one observations, covering seven countries, were missing data for World
Bank involvement, GDP growth, GDP per capita, or government opinion on pop-
ulation growth, and so were assigned the mean value for that variable for that year.
After the data were lagged, an additional six observations were dropped because of
data being unavailable for World Bank involvement and ties to international NGOs.
The final data set thus has approximately 500 observations. Because there are
multiple observations per country, time-invariant variables repeat for each country,
so I present robust standard errors to test for statistical significance. I performed the
analysis using Stata, version 12.
Results
Table 3 shows the results from the event-history analysis predicting population
policy adoption in a given year across the 42 countries in sub-Saharan Africa
included in the analysis. The first model includes the variables measuring normative
and coercive ties to the world polity (Hypotheses 1 and 2, respectively), as well as
controls. The second model includes internal factors that measure economic and
demographic pressure (Hypothesis 3), as well as controls. Model 3 includes both
world polity and internal factors. The final model interacts the measure of normative
pressure, the number of international NGOs, with an indicator for the post-1994
period.
The results from the regression analysis indicate that both ties to the world polity
and internal characteristics of countries predict population policy adoption.
Considering world polity factors, the number of ties to international NGOs is only
a significant predictor of population policy adoption after 1994 (Model 4),
supporting the argument (Hypothesis 1) that normative ties to the world polity
became more salient after the 1994 United Nations conference that institutionalized
reproductive health as a global norm. Substituting an indicator for whether a country
had an affiliate of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in a given year
as a precise measure of the local presence of a specific international organization
supportive of population policy, the effect is not significant in either period. (Results
R. S. Robinson
123
not shown.) In addition, across all models, higher levels of World Bank involvement
are positive, significant predictors of population policy adoption, supporting
Hypothesis 2 that countries that experienced greater coercive pressure were more
likely to adopt population policies.
There is no support for Hypothesis 3, that countries with low economic growth or
high population growth were more likely to adopt population policies. GDP per capita,
one of the control variables, is, however, a significant predictor of population policy
adoption across models. Indeed, poorer countries were more likely to adopt population
policies, suggesting that organizations like the World Bank would have had greater
leverage over them, that their governments might have been more desperate to take
visible action toward improving socioeconomic development, or that their leaders
may have deployed strategies of extraversion to extract resources from donors. Thus,
there is some support for the economic component of Hypothesis 3.
In addition to GDP per capita, in all but one model, the percentage of a country’s
population that was Catholic has a significant, negative relationship with population
Table 3 Coefficients from logistic regressions predicting population policy adoption, sub-Saharan
Africa, 1984–2003
Variable Model
(1) (2) (3) (4)
World Polity Factors
Normative Pressure
International NGOs 0.57 0.65 0.41
International NGOs*post-1994 0.18*
Coercive Pressure
World Bank involvement 0.87** 0.87** 0.91**
Internal Factors
Economic and Demographic Pressure
GDP growth rate 0.05 0.07 0.07
Pop. growth rate 0.19 -0.08 0.08
Controls
GDP per capita -0.63* -0.68** -0.77** -0.67*
Gov. believed pop. growth too high 1987 0.80 0.64 0.79 1.22*
Catholic population -0.04* -0.01 -0.04* -0.04*
Democracy 0.13** 0.08* 0.13** 0.10*
Conflict -1.01 -0.71 -1.07 -1.13
Intercept -18.55** 1.09 -17.99** -19.25**
N 495 500 495 495
Number of countries 42 42 42 42
Log likelihood -91.67 -104.30 -90.19 -88.23
Pseudo R2 (%) 19.0 8.1 20.3 22.0
See Table 2 for descriptions of variables
Unexponentiated coefficients; * p \ 0.05, ** p \ 0.01, *** p \ 0.001 (two-tailed tests)
Source: See text
Population Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa
123
policy adoption. Presumably in these countries, leaders were less willing to take on
the issue of population policy, or opposition from Catholic groups complicated the
process of policy adoption. Democracy is also significant across all models: more
democratic countries were more likely to adopt population policies. Whether
democracies had greater commitment to social welfare or responded to popular
pressure to take some action to improve the economy is impossible to tell. Model 4
shows that governments of countries who believed population growth was too high
in 1987 were significantly more likely to adopt policies. The measure of conflict is
not significant in any model, although as Table 1 shows, many of the countries that
did not adopt population policies experienced multiple years of conflict during the
time period observed.
The results of the regression analysis thus provide support for the first two
hypotheses: (1) that normative pressure from international NGOs predicted
population policy adoption only after population policy became a means to express
support for the internationally sanctioned norm of reproductive rights; and (2) that
coercive pressure from international donors was associated with population policy
adoption across time. There is also some support for the third hypothesis that a poor
economic outlook in the form of lower GDP per capita may have prompted
countries to adopt population policies. In addition, regardless of time, democracies
were more likely, and countries with larger Catholic populations were less likely, to
adopt population policies.
Of course, not all countries in sub-Saharan Africa adopted population policies.
The countries without such policies are listed at the bottom of Table 1, and in
general are quite fragile, having disproportionately suffered conflict and economic
collapse. The World Bank has lent these countries money, but proportionately less
than those with population policies, and these countries also have fewer ties to
international NGOs (results not shown). Thus, the fact that these countries have no
policy to reduce population growth reflects the conclusions drawn from the
regression analysis. At the most basic level, the economic and political chaos faced
in many of these countries likely severely limited their capacity to adopt policies of
any type, as well as prevented donors from promoting population policies to their
governments.
Conclusions
The analysis of population policy in sub-Saharan Africa provides guidance in
interpreting the role of the world polity in state-level behavior. Specifically, the
analysis above shows that ties to the world polity predict the behavior of developing
countries, but in varied ways. Ties to organizations likely to exert normative
pressure are most influential when something about international norms—
reproductive health as a human right in the case of population policy—is at stake.
Ties to organizations that can exert coercive pressure matter regardless of time, but
may be easier for wealthier countries to resist. Across time, characteristics of
countries themselves are still important: in the case of population policy,
particularly GDP per capita, democracy, and religion.
R. S. Robinson
123
What of population policy today? The global community’s interest in the topic
waned in the 1990s as HIV prevalence rose and fertility rates continued to drop
around the world. In addition, and somewhat ironically, the 1994 Cairo conference’s
emphasis on improving women’s status more broadly shifted global attention away
from contraceptive provision (Cleland et al. 2006). There has, however, been a
resurgence of interest in slowing population growth and increasing contraception
provision as the environmental movement has regained steam and the 2015 deadline
approaches to meet Millennium Development Goal Five, reducing maternal
mortality (May 2012). Indeed, the July 2012 family planning summit convened
by the Gates Foundation and DfID, the British bilateral aid agency, generated new
enthusiasm, and new financial support, for family planning (Shiffman and Quissell
2012). The renewed prioritization of family planning reflects a shift away from
reproductive health and a reemphasis on technological solutions to problems
(unwanted pregnancy, maternal mortality) that ultimately have deep social,
political, and economic roots. Given that most developing countries already have
population policies, the newfound support for family planning most likely will not
lead to new population policies. Instead, countries are more likely to revise existing
policies—as did Kenya and Malawi in 2012 (Government of Malawi 2012;
Republic of Kenya 2012)—or to develop less expansive programs and strategies
that hone in on the provision of contraception. African governments’ experiences
with population policy, however, deepen our understanding of how ties to the world
polity influence country-level action. They serve as a reminder that the global ties
that structure the world polity remain far from balanced and are highly complex,
such that understanding individual countries’ behavior requires analyzing both the
ties, as well as how countries experience and deploy the material and ideological
resources transmitted by those ties.
Acknowledgments This research was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research
Fellowship as well as a Faculty Research Award from American University. It greatly benefitted from
feedback from the Berkeley Center for Culture, Organization, and Politics workshop, the Berkeley
Department of Demography Brown Bag Series, and the session on cross-national sociology at the 2006
American Sociological Association meeting. I am particularly indebted to the suggestions of the
anonymous reviewers from PRPR. I thank Yolande Bouka, Dorothy Fort, Barbara Lukunka, Katie Rice,
Jennifer Vanderburgh and Yang Zhang for their research assistance. I also gratefully acknowledge the
thoughtful comments of Deborah Barrett, Neil Fligstein, David John Frank, Shannon Gleason, Gene
Hammel, Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, Kate Haulman, Charles Kurzman, Adrea Lawrence, Damon Mayrl,
Benjamin Moodie, Aliya Saperstein, Evan Schofer, Susan Shepler, Sarah Staveteig, Ann Swidler, Bryan
Sykes, Sarah Walchuk Thayer, Sarah Tom, Kenneth Wachter, Susan Watkins, Brenda Werth, Elizabeth
Worden, and Danzhen You.
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