Technological (Mis)conceptions: Examining birth control as conservation in coastal Madagascar

Abstract

Population-health-environment (PHE) initiatives theoretically serve as a holistic and integrative solution to health problems, biodiversity degradation, and resource scarcity. In the past few decades increasing amounts of official development assistance and private funding have been funneled towards PHE initiatives in biodiverse developing countries. Here we draw on fieldwork in Madagascar to show how PHE initiatives reinforce a problematic politics of scale, framing environmental degradation as a local environmental problem amenable to global population solutions, while inadequate attention is given to non “local“ drivers of natural resource change such as the structure and orientation of the country's political economy, the broader socio-cultural context and resource tenure constraints, the influence of colonial policies and economic reorganization, and current natural resource management strategies. We argue, that while local population growth is not absent from the complex dynamics influencing environmental changes in these biodiverse regions, situating resource use practices in relation to policies and practices at multiple scales not only more accurately addresses drivers of resource scarcity, but also pushes against abstracting relations between population and natural resources from their specific context in ways that insert global discourses and interventions into local contexts and communities. Additionally, we argue that while the language of “gender equality” and “women's empowerment” has been taken up by conservation organizations advancing PHE programs in Madagascar, these terms have been hollowed of their intellectual and political weight, reinforcing rather than challenging gendered inequality.