Conceptualizing Population in Sustainable Development: From “Population Stabilization” to “Population Balance”

How we think about population in sustainable development matters. It matters to how we organize our observations, and it matters, most importantly, to the formulation and implementation of appropriate policies. Unfortunately, the rationales for those policies are now in considerable disarray. There is no unified framework within which to think about population in sustainable development; only partial approaches are used to deal with specific situations.