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Revisionism in the Rationale for Population Policies

All three papers in this issue of Population Horizons look at population policies in low and middle income countries. Two of the papers focus on particular countries, Ethiopia (Hailemariam 2016) and Iran (Hosseini-Chavoshi et al 2016), where the governments have very different views and concerns about the direction of their current population trends. The third paper looks at the adoption of population policies across Sub-Saharan Africa (Sullivan Robinson 2016). As arguments and disputes in the recent past tell us, population policies may easily become contentious, especially when they are perceived as promoting social objectives in ways that may interfere with individual preferences or established cultural norms (Connelly 2008; May 2012). Although these controversies have most often flared up when governments have announced that they want to reduce the growth rate of the population by curtailing fertility, policy proposals that are intended to increase fertility may also provoke arguments along the same basic fault lines1: the relationship between the government’s aims and the justification for their intervention in this sphere of private life; and the implications or likely effects of specific policy measures for individual well-being. What links the papers in this issue of Population Horizons is their focus on the ways in which these issues play out in the context of current or recent policy debates in particular countries. There are major differences of course in the issues or challenges that policy-makers have to confront. How could this not be so, when the aim in Iran is to raise fertility because it is judged to be too low; and in Ethiopia and