Doctoral Degrees (Political Science)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (Political Science) by Subject "Birth control -- South Africa"

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    A policy analysis: from population control to the construction of sexual and reproductive health post-apartheid, 1994-2021
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03 ) Stevens, Marion; Gouws, Amanda; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Political Science.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: South Africa has a rich political history of health policy, that has been reformed since apartheid. There has been legal reform with progressive law and provision of new guidelines for sexual and reproductive health. Yet the landscape is informed by interconnected structural drivers and social determinants that have embedded power inequities. Sexual and reproductive health is nuanced and has evolved over decades. This research study is a policy analysis of how policy on sexual and reproductive health has been constructed and constituted as problematic post-apartheid, and how this has led to reproductive justice or lack thereof. The research is informed by qualitative, constructionist/interpretivist orientations with document reviews of policy and legislation, and interviews with key informants, asking how the construction of sexual and reproductive health policy reform post-apartheid has been constituted and represented, and by whom. Carol Bacchi’s What is the Problem Represented to Be? and Sandra Harding’s Feminist Standpoint theory have been used as complementary research methods. The legacy of apartheid and colonialism directly informs the social and political construction of sexual and reproductive health and rights. The South African context is informed by a shadow of the legacy of inequalities and this contributes to challenges in transformative implementation to realise sexual and reproductive justice. The current context, despite some 25 years post democracy, is embedded in interlinked structural and social determinants laden and burdened with power imbalances. A paper tiger of legal reform provided for a strong footing of sexual and reproductive health and rights, with textual flow threaded through the population policy, adolescent sexual and reproductive health framework strategy and the fertility control policies. A fraught socio-political landscape facilitates the reality of uneven services and care in sexual and reproductive health. What remains is a context of poor service delivery that is informed by entangled and contested power relations and a fraught socially constructed ideological environment. Ideologies of population control persist in an untransformed and stagnant context with inadequate implementation of equitable services. The sexual and reproductive health and rights environment in South Africa is contested with a range of competing and invested stakeholders who are not always ideologically aligned. The presence of international donors informs an industry of implementation programming and research. What remains are stakeholders who are interested and invested in defending their constructed positions, and who perpetuate the status quo of sexual and reproductive health and rights in South Africa. This informs the landscape of socially constructed policies that represent ideas, assumptions and understandings. Alongside these represented notions are interwoven connected and juxtaposing dominant and marginalised framings along with silences on sexual and reproductive health and rights.