| Summary: | This dissertation examines the making and implementation of reproductive health policy in India. Its spatial and theoretical territory is the gap between International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo in 1994 and the quinquennial review that concluded in a United Nations Special Session in New York in June 1999. Its epistemological territory is the gap between the policy prescriptions of the Programme of Action and their limited realisation in India by 1999. It builds its case by a careful reading of development texts: lack of solid evidence on the ground makes it very difficult to examine concrete evidence of impact, though the dissertation includes a detailed case study of the implementation of a reproductive health project in the state of West Bengal. In seeking to understand the nature of the gap between policy and practice, the dissertation traces in detail the events between 1994 and 1999, particularly those of key actors engaged in creating the new public sector discourse of reproductive and child health - the Government Ministry of Health and family Welfare, the World Bank, the European Commission, and other external agencies, such as the UK Overseas Development Administration (later the Department for International Development (DFID)), as well as Indian commentators. In the process it asks questions about policy making and the implementation, asking whether the gap between policy and practice was a result of poor policy prescriptions and implementation, a more general problem of development cooperation, or an inevitable consequence of the ideological and political nature of policy making. It concludes that international policy 'skyscrapers' such as the Cairo Programme of Action cast shadows over the landscape behind them, which inevitably masquerade as gaps between policy and practice. Better understanding the ideological nature of policy, and the real content of this apparent gap provides a starting point for a more appropriate agenda for development cooperation.
|
|---|
