Population and Reproductive Health
Oral History Project
Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College
Northampton, MA
Steven Sinding
Interviewed by
Deborah McFarlane
March 15, 2004
London, England
This interview was made possible with generous support
from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
© Sophia Smith Collection 2006
Population and Reproductive Health Oral History Project
Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College
Narrator
Steven W. Sinding, Ph.D. (b. 1943) retired as director general of the International Planned Parenthood
Federation in 2006. Trained as a political scientist, he served as director of USAID's Office of
Population (1983-1986), as well as senior population advisor at the World Bank, population director at
the Rockefeller Foundation, and professor at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia
University.
Interviewer
Deborah R. McFarlane is professor of political science at the University of New Mexico. She is the
author, with K.J. Meier, of The Politics of Fertility Control: Family Planning and Abortion Politics in the
American States (Congressional Quarterly Press, 2001). McFarlane worked as an administrator and a
consultant in reproductive health in the U.S. and internationally for more than three decades.
Restrictions
None
Format
Four 60-minute audiocassettes.
Transcript
Transcribed, audited and edited at Baylor University. Transcript has been reviewed and approved by
Steven Sinding.
Bibliography and Footnote Citation Forms
Audio Recording
Bibliography: Steven Sinding. Interview by Deborah McFarlane. Audio recording, March 15, 2004.
Population and Reproductive Health Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection. Footnote:
Steven Sinding, interview by Deborah McFarlane, audio recording, March 15, 2004, Population and
Reproductive Health Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, tape 1.
Transcript
Bibliography: Steven Sinding. Interview by Deborah McFarlane. Transcript of audio recording,
March 15, 2004. Population and Reproductive Health Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection.
Footnote: Steven Sinding, interview by Deborah McFarlane, transcript of audio recording, March 15,
2004, Population and Reproductive Health Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, p. 23.
Population and Reproductive Health Oral History Project
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P opulation and Reproductive Health
Oral H istory P roje ct
Steven Sinding
Interviewed by Deborah McFarlane
March 15, 2004
London, United Kingdom
McFarlane
—March 15, 2004. I‟m Deborah McFarlane, and I‟m about to interview
Steven Sinding for his oral history. Dr. Sinding, you were interviewed in
2001 by W. Haven North from the U.S. Foreign Service Officers
Association and their foreign assistance program series. I‟ve read that oral
history, and I would like to focus on your career since you retired from AID
[USAID: United States Agency for International Development], the World
Bank, Columbia [University], Rockefeller, as well as ask you some follow-up
questions about specific events and themes in your USAID career. First of
all, you are at IPPF [International Planned Parenthood Federation] now.
What led you to IPPF?
Sinding
I was recruited by a headhunter, and I was very reluctant actually to take the
job. I had worked with IPPF for many years, never directly, but always as a
grant maker, first at USAID, then during my brief period at the World Bank
and then at the Rockefeller Foundation. And I was well aware of IPPF‟s
many weaknesses, in addition to its considerable strengths, but I knew above
all that IPPF had a history of extremely difficult governance issues, and I
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wasn‟t sure at this point in my career that I wanted to take those on.
McFarlane
Can you elaborate a bit about the governance issues?
Sinding
Yeah, I need to go into some detail on this. IPPF was established by a small
group of courageous volunteers as an affinity group of a very small number,
eight, national family planning associations in 1952. Margaret Sanger was the
driving force behind the creation of IPPF, and she wanted to create an
international movement of national family planning associations that would
take the family planning message to as many countries as possible. She never
foresaw it as a funding mechanism. She saw it largely, as I say, as an affinity
group, as a group of autonomous national institutions that could learn from
one another and through membership acquire international strength and
voice. But what happened to IPPF is that when the donors became serious
about providing assistance in the area of population, there were very few
existing institutions through which they could channel their money,
including national governments, which were extremely reluctant in the fifties
and even in the late sixties when the donors got interested, very reluctant to
take donor money. And so, IPPF became kind of a natural target of the
donors. Here was, by that time, a federation of twenty, thirty, maybe forty
countries which had clinical programs in place in many instances, where the
infusion of donor money could substantially expand the availability of
services and enhance the capacity of the national associations—mostly called
family planning associations—to lobby governments for policy change.
McFarlane
So, they already had service delivery in place.
Sinding
Service delivery was the mechanism through which IPPF did its advocacy.
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One of IPPF‟s great strengths was that it was able to demonstrate to
governments that family planning was something that could be done safely
and in a relatively non-controversial way and that it was responding to a real
demand by women—mostly women. So, the donor interest in IPPF
fundamentally transformed the institution from an affinity group of highlymotivated volunteers into a bureaucratic service delivery institution. IPPF
became answerable to the donors as well as to its own constituency in terms
of the funding it was receiving, and that put the secretariat of IPPF in a
situation that persists to this day of essentially having to walk the narrow line
between serving its constituency—that is, the membership—and responding
to the requirements and the expectations of the donors. Since those two
don‟t necessarily coincide and often conflict, especially when it comes to the
allocation of resources, being the director general or the secretary general of
IPPF is a very, very difficult job.
McFarlane
Can you give me an example of where they might conflict on a—?
Sinding
Yeah, the volunteers, the representatives of the national associations feel that
funds ought to be allocated on the basis of an entitlement, that they are a
member of IPPF, therefore they are entitled to a certain amount of funding
for the work they do. The donors say, Give the money to a, the countries
that are more important, and b, the associations that could demonstrate
value for money or the quality of their work. To the extent that IPPF and
the central secretariat has attempted to use a performance base as a criterion
for the allocation of resources, this has flown directly in the face of the
expectations of volunteers which want some sort of equity in the distribution
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of resources that recognizes that all the members have an entitlement to
resources.
McFarlane
So, you knew this coming in.
Sinding
I knew this, absolutely.
McFarlane
Why did you take the job?
Sinding
Because I didn‟t need it. I took the job because I thought as someone who
was ready to walk out the door at any moment that the volunteers disagreed
with me or refused to take my advice, I would have considerably greater
power than those who came into this position trying to always tread that line
between volunteer interests and the donors. I came in determined to do
what I thought had to be done to set IPPF on a successful course as an
international institution performing an important function in the field of
reproductive health. And to the extent that the volunteers disagreed with me
or balked at my recommendations, I was ready to walk, and I‟m still ready to
walk.
McFarlane
Well, how long have you been here?
Sinding
Eighteen, nineteen months, twenty months, something like that. Since
September 2, 2002.
McFarlane
So, how did they talk you into it?
Sinding
I went through three interviews with a selection committee that was
comprised of the presidents of the six IPPF regions, so I was talking to the
senior volunteers. I was talking to the most powerful members of the
governing council. And I said to them exactly what I‟m saying to you, that it
seemed to me that IPPF was in deep trouble financially as a consequence of
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the fact that many of its traditional donors had lost confidence in its ability
to allocate resources effectively, that it had lost its way strategically and
philosophically, and that if I took the job I would do so on the
understanding that I would establish a new strategic vision for IPPF and I
would take very seriously the performance of the membership in the
allocation of resources, and they agreed to that. They basically accepted the
fact that the federation was on the verge of collapse if they didn‟t get their
house in order, and they were prepared to hire somebody with strong views
and a strong will to whip things into shape. And so far it‟s gone very well.
McFarlane
What is your vision?
Sinding
I think that what made IPPF a really powerful and significant force in the
early days of family planning was its courage and its righteous indignation. It
used the phrase brave and angry to describe itself in those years when—
McFarlane
Years are approximately—
Sinding
From 1952 to 1960 when Elise Ottesen-Jensen from Sweden and Lady
[Dhanvanthi] Rama Rau from India and Margaret Sanger were running the
federation and Mrs. Sato from Japan. Those women were righteously
indignant about the lack of access of women to contraception, that the fact
that that lack of ability to control their own fertility was holding back women
in every aspect of life, and they were determined to use the force of numbers
and their anger and their indignation to confront governments to change
policies and to build programs. They did it in the face of great hostility.
Some of them went to jail. They were fighting traditional patriarchal
structures. They were fighting traditional religious and cultural values. They
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were challenging convention at every turn. And what made it a great
movement was the fact that it was inspired by a sense of injustice. My vision
was to return IPPF to that tradition of advocacy, of indignation, of
determination to deal with the unfinished business of the reproductive
revolution. It seemed to me that what IPPF had allowed itself to become
was an instrument of the donor community to simply be a service delivery
outlet. Once it had consolidated the victory of family planning, it was
perfectly happy just to be serving, in most countries, relatively small
clienteles with conventional family planning services that were
indistinguishable in many cases from what were available from public sector
and commercial sources. So, IPPF had failed by the 1990s, even by the early
eighties, to distinguish itself from many, many other NGO‟s and
governmental service delivery institutions. My vision was to bring IPPF back
to the cutting edge of advocacy, and to do so, as I say, in the unfinished
business of the reproductive revolution, which is the continuing controversy
surrounding services for young people, unsafe abortion, HIV/AIDS, access
for the poor and the excluded, and advocacy, and we call it the five A‟s since
every one of those words starts with an A. And what is remarkable is how
the federation from the governing council down to essentially every national
association accepted that agenda and along with it the notion that they
needed to change from conventional family planning service delivery into a
new advocacy agenda based upon controversial and difficult issues.
McFarlane
You‟ve had to break time, too, given U.S. government‟s position to—
Sinding
Well, I think lying in the background of my determination to do this was my
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anger at the Bush Administration and my determination to try to do what I
could to counteract that, and as an American I thought I was in a particularly
strong position to be advocating the opposite of what the U.S. government
was standing for under Bush.
McFarlane
Has funding been a problem?
Sinding
Since I came?
McFarlane
Um-hm.
Sinding
No. Of course, funding had declined to the point where the federation was
in crisis. When my predecessor, once removed, Halfdan Mahler, left the job,
the budget of unrestricted funds flowing through the central secretariat of
IPPF was in excess of a hundred million dollars. When I took over, it was at
47 million dollars. So, the funds available to the secretariat for distribution to
the membership had declined by around 60 percent. That was a crisis, and it
was a crisis not only of resources, but it was also a crisis of confidence. Since
I‟ve taken over, we have managed to increase the budget to about seventy
million this year, and there‟s every sign that it‟s continuing to go up in part
because governments are eager to try to offset to the extent they can the
damage that the Bush Administration has done through its withdrawal of
funding from us and UNFPA [United National Population Fund] but also, I
think, because the new vision—and I haven‟t talked about the whole vision.
I‟ve talked about the content of it but not the implementation of it. But they
had confidence that IPPF was back on the right track, that this vision made
sense and it was something they were prepared to invest in, so I think that
the restoration of funding is a function of indignation toward the U.S. and
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renewed confidence in IPPF.
McFarlane
Is this a good time to talk about the implementation strategy?
Sinding
Yeah, IPPF had lost the confidence of the donors, not only because they
didn‟t think it stood for anything particularly unique or distinguishable.
McFarlane
Is this both foundations and governments?
Sinding
Yeah, but also because it had become increasingly clear as the donors
became more and more knowledgeable about conditions at the country level,
that many of IPPF‟s members were performing very badly, were, in fact,
weak institutions. When I was at USAID, we were always reluctant to make
the annual contribution to IPPF or to increase it because the reports coming
back from our field missions were so overwhelmingly negative in many areas
about the quality of the IPPF members. There are, of course, really
important exceptions to that general statement, particularly in the Western
Hemisphere region where IPPF has been much stronger than it has in the
other regions, but in some the other regions as well there have been
exceptions to the general feeling of weakness of the associations. But the
other side of the coin from establishing a new vision for the federation was
to address head on this issue of implementation, of operational capacity, and
it seems to me in the long run IPPF survival depends upon getting its own
administrative and operational house in order. It‟s got to show that funding
IPPF and through IPPF its national members is good value for money in
comparison with alternative uses of scarce resources, and in a lot of
countries I can‟t make that claim today. The reason the money is going up is
because I have acknowledged to the donors that it is an issue that I take
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seriously and am prepared to try to work on. But they‟re taking it on faith at
this point that I‟ll be able to deliver on that. I mean, all of them recognize
that a compelling vision is only as good as the capacity of the institution to
follow through on the ground, and there‟s not yet any evidence that IPPF
has met the latter challenge.
McFarlane
What are you doing operationally? Have you restructured?
Sinding
Yeah, I‟ve begun the process of restructuring. I‟ve substantially changed
both the structure and the composition of the central office. We‟ve reduced
by twenty people the payroll here.
McFarlane
Out of how many?
Sinding
We went from about ninety-six to seventy-six or seventy-seven people.
McFarlane
So, that‟s significant, yeah.
Sinding
Twenty percent. And I have tried to restructure the central office so that it
just operates more efficiently and in a more coherent fashion. When I got
here, there were no fewer than fifteen people reporting directly to the
director general, and there was no deputy. So, the director general has not
only the responsibilities for directly supervising fifteen-odd people but also
managing the entire external side of the job which is itself a full-time
requirement.
McFarlane
By external, do you mean governance?
Sinding
I mean the donors, I mean the national governments with which we work, I
mean the governing council and all the family planning associations, as well
as our partners in the field. I work probably 80 percent of my time externally
representing IPPF: fundraising, going to conferences, speaking on behalf of
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the federation, and that leaves a full-time job internally for the management
of the secretariat. I didn‟t see how that could be done without having a fulltime deputy, and so the very first thing I did was to establish that position
and recruit a competent administrator/manager to take that on. In addition,
we‟ve streamlined things so that external affairs, communications advocacy
and fundraising are all in one group. And the programmatic functions, the
backstopping of the regional offices and the family planning associations and
the members, in terms of the five A‟s and the programmatic substance is
another technical area. And then administration is the third area which
comes directly under the purview of my deputy. That streamlining of
functions substantially reduced the supervisory load on both me and my
deputy and has created coherence so that people who need to be working
with one another and communicating with one another are now in
relationships where that communication naturally occurs. So, that was part
of what I‟ve done. Second thing I‟ve done is to initiate a process of
performance-based resource allocation. The governing council asked me at
my request at my first governing council meeting in November 2002, to do
three things: to develop a new strategic plan, to restructure the secretariat,
and to come up with a new resource allocation system. We did the first two
within the first year, and last November the governing council approved the
strategic plan. The previous May they had approved the new structure of the
secretariat. And we will this May be taking to them the new resource
allocation scheme based on the five A‟s, and what it contains is a clear
commitment to use performance as a criterion for the allocation of resources
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for the first time. IPPF has never used performance as a resource allocation
criterion, at least not explicitly, in its entire history, so this is a major step
forward. And it means that the associations know that they‟re going to be
evaluated and that they‟re going to be held accountable for the funds they
receive, and if they don‟t use them well they will in time lose them. One of
the caveats on that is that I‟ve pledged to the governing council that we will
give every association a period of time where it is deemed to be weak in
implementation and administrative capacity to build capacity so that we will
not immediately cut funding from weak associations, but what we will insist
on is that where, in the judgment of the regional director, the association
does not have the capacity to absorb additional resources without building
capacity for the management of programs, that a portion of the funds will be
set aside for capacity building explicitly: training, restructuring, management
assistance, whatever the regional director deems necessary. Also, the
resource allocation decisions for countries will be made by the regions, not
by the central office. We allocate to the regions on the basis of a set of
criteria which I hope the governing council will accept in May, but then it‟s
up to the regions to allocate to the countries on the basis of their assessment
of capacity and performance.
McFarlane
Have you experienced any conflict between the performance and
governance at this point? You‟ve got membership organizations that you‟re
allocating funds to. Is that correct?
Sinding
Yeah. Not yet, but we haven‟t implemented this yet. I expect that we‟re
going to have a much more difficult discussion at the May governing council
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on resource allocation than we had about the strategic plan or about the
restructuring of the secretariat. I think on the strategic plan there was
enough agreement and a wide enough process of consultation that
everybody felt by the time we actually formally presented it that they had had
ample opportunity to have input. Furthermore, all of them agreed at some
level that these five priorities were the right five priorities for IPPF. There‟s
been some grumbling at the edges. Some of these stronger traditional
associations which have been doing family planning forever wanted to just
be left alone to continue doing what they‟re doing, and they didn‟t like being
pushed in the direction of the new priorities, but actually none of them had
the courage to say so.
McFarlane
You knew who they were. (chuckling)
Sinding
Well, they grumbled, and I can hear it sort of under the surface. But to sort
of say we should be working on abortion or we shouldn‟t be working on the
problems of adolescents is something they couldn‟t—it would be politically
incorrect to say that, and so they just say, Well, there‟s not enough focus on
meeting the needs of the entire population for services and so on. But
basically, the volunteers are comfortable, I think, with the strategic plan.
When they see that performance is really going to be a criterion that is
seriously applied and that evaluation is going to be the tool that we use to
judge how it should be applied, there‟s going to be considerable discomfort,
and I think we may have some fights. We‟ve also had a change in leadership,
which is subtle and interesting. The president of IPPF who recruited me and
who championed my presidency—
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McFarlane
Who was—
Sinding
—was Angela Gómez, the president of Profamilia-Colombia. Angela
stepped down as president in November and was succeeded by Nina Puri
who is the president of the Family Planning Association of India. Nina
doesn‟t have the same stake in my success that Angela did. Nina also has a
different orientation toward the relationship between staff and volunteers
than Angela.
McFarlane
Can you explain that a bit?
Sinding
Well, Angela comes from a modern business-management background. She
has a degree in public administration from the [John F.] Kennedy School [of
Government] at Harvard, and she has a management-by-objectives, sort of
rational-planning-management approach to things and clearly understood
that IPPF needed to be a lean and modern, well-managed institution. Nina
still is very committed to the romantic notion of a volunteer-headed,
volunteer-driven federation in which the staff is there to do the bidding of
the volunteers but the volunteers make the decisions and set the course, and
so there is an underlying resentment on her part on what she calls the topdown way in which the five A‟s was introduced. And so, I think she would
prefer a model which had a weak secretariat and a strong governing council,
whereas Angela understood that a modern organization has to have a strong
secretariat with a governing council that restricts itself to broad policy and
budget oversight.
McFarlane
More like a business than a majority.
Sinding
More like a business, yeah. And I frankly don‟t know how it‟s going to work
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with Nina. If she tries seriously to circumscribe my authority in turning IPPF
into a modern effective organization, I‟ll leave.
McFarlane
And that‟s the strength you really have to offer in addition—
Sinding
I‟m ready to walk tomorrow.
McFarlane
—in addition to your experience and training, of course.
Sinding
Well, I can also tell you that the response and the feedback from the
community to the leadership I‟ve shown in the year and a half I‟ve been here
has just been overwhelming.
McFarlane
By community you mean—
Sinding
I mean the donors—
Tape 1, side 1 ends; side 2 begins.
Sinding
—and so many letters and notes and comments, formal and informal
feedback about what a great job I‟m doing in turning around IPPF that I
know that as far as the external constituency is concerned—that is, the
people on whom we depend for money and whose approval we require to
be effective—is just very, very strong, and that‟s my bargaining chip. That‟s
what they hired me for, that‟s what they knew IPPF needed, and if I say that
I‟m leaving because I cannot work with this governing council it‟ll be just
frankly devastating for IPPF. I don‟t mean to make this sound too
egotistical—
McFarlane
But it‟s what they need now.
Sinding
—but it‟s the truth. If they lose me now, they‟re going to be in worse shape
than they were when they hired me.
McFarlane
I‟ve noticed in reading your oral history up through 2001, that I could see
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the mind of the social scientist in an action job. And I wonder, how has this
kind of shaped your management philosophy, or maybe we could just start
with your management philosophy. But I see you throughout that oral
history talking about paradigms and—
Sinding
Yeah, well—yeah. I don‟t know whether I‟m instinctively a social scientist or
by training a social scientist. I haven‟t been a practicing social scientist for
such a long time that one has to believe it‟s more instinct at this point than
anything else. I tend to think about—my mind works in terms of broad
relationships, social relationships, political relationships, and so I tend to see
any work I‟m doing, I think, as a consequence of my training as a social
scientist in a broader context than somebody who hasn‟t had that kind of
training. In reading the oral history, you probably saw the business about the
conflict between sort of the Ravenholtian family planning view and sort of
the social change model of fertility decline, and I think that my social science
training enabled me to see a lot of the subtleties and the gray areas that
maybe other people with different kinds of training, public health training or
whatever, medical training, don‟t see. In terms of my management
philosophy, I think that comes more from just instincts about people than
anything else, and I don‟t know. It may come from training or just what I
learned at home from my parents, both of whom were managers.
McFarlane
Oh, interesting. Tell me about them.
Sinding
My father was an industrial engineer who became a business—a corporate
manager, and my mother was the field director of the Gallup Poll for several
years, both of them in jobs where they had to manage people and human
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relationships. And I used to—just dinnertime conversation—used to hear
about those issues, and one of the things that was discussed a lot was
delegation of authority and how to do it. And I think to the extent that I‟ve
had success as a manager, it has come from my willingness to delegate a
great deal to subordinates and to trust people to use that authority or
responsibility well. In every job I‟ve had, I think the people who have
worked for me have really appreciated that and have responded to the
challenge. Part of it, I think, is that I‟m naturally lazy, (McFarlane laughs) and
it‟s a lot easier to get other people to do the work than to do it yourself. I do
tend, though, to fairly carefully review what people do and to let them know
if I don‟t think it‟s up to standard and to try to work with them to
understand why it fails to meet my standards. But I‟ve also had to overcome
or to unlearn a lot of things you learn as a social scientist about how
institutions function and how they function effectively. Academia is not the
best place to learn management practices—
McFarlane
Tell me about that. What do you mean?
Sinding
—(laughs) as you probably know. Academic institutions are perhaps among
the worst-managed institutions and as [Henry] Kissinger always used to say,
perhaps the sites of the nastiest politics because, as he said, the stakes were
so low. And I had to learn a lot about hierarchy and about the importance of
a chain of command and a line of authority and the acceptance of authority.
In an organization that is focused on achieving a set of objectives, you really
do have to have a line of authority and of command, which is antithetical to
the academic model where, in fact, the greatest value is on maximizing
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freedom: freedom of expression, freedom of investigation. And so,
unlearning some of the most important values of the academic life was an
important part of becoming effective in the bureaucratic setting.
McFarlane
That‟s an interesting comment for me, having read your oral history and
your relationship with Rei Ravenholt in the early years.
Sinding
Well, I‟m not great at accepting authority myself, but when I really respect
the people I work for—and there are two in particular that I could point to.
I think I mentioned Joseph Wheeler, the mission director in Pakistan, in my
USAID oral history. The other was Kenneth Prewitt, who was my
immediate supervisor at the Rockefeller Foundation for the six years I was
there. I have no trouble accepting authority. In the case of Ravenholt, it‟s
much more complicated than that because I did respect Ravenholt‟s drive,
his single-mindedness, his bureaucratic skills, his charismatic qualities. I even
respected his genius for oversimplifying, and I learned a lot from that, that
sometimes to be effective in a bureaucratic setting you have to simplify in a
way that is anathema to scholars.
McFarlane
That two-minute sound bite, if you will?
Sinding
Yeah, and it works at all kinds of different levels, and it does not stand up to
rigorous challenge or investigation. But it helps to keep an institution
focused, and you can become immobilized by overly appreciating the
complexity of things, and Ravenholt taught me a lot about sort of cutting
things down to the bare bones. I thought he went too far, but that was the
social scientist in me, saying this guy is ignoring really important
programmatic issues for the sake of kind of pursuing his very pristine vision
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of how things should work, in other words, ignoring demand issues, basically
focusing on supply issues to the exclusion of any consideration of demand,
which I thought was wrong, but I learned a lot from Ravenholt about how
useful it can be to keep things simple.
McFarlane
I want to follow up on that point a little bit later because I think there‟s
some real richness in that relationship and what it says about you. I also want
to ask you, in terms of hierarchy and delegation, you must have—so, you‟ve
hired good people. You‟ve delegated to them over the years. How do you
pick them out? You had to hire a deputy here. You have a history of this.
Sinding
Well, like all managers I‟ve made a lot of mistakes, and when you
interview—have you talked to Duff [Gillespie] yet?
McFarlane
I didn‟t. Rebecca did.
Sinding
Yeah. Duff would be the first to tell you about some of those, when he was
my deputy at USAID and we disagreed about people. And sometimes he was
right, and sometimes I was right. I would say my judgment about people has
gotten better with experience, but I‟ve always, I think, had a philosophy that
it‟s better to hire the smartest and most solidly grounded person than the
person who is necessarily best qualified on paper for a particular position.
It‟s sort of recruiting-the-best-athlete philosophy. A lot of, oh, soccer and
basketball coaches will tell you that rather than trying to recruit players for
particular positions, their approach is to hire the best athlete, to recruit the
best athlete, and then to mold those athletes into a team. And I feel much
the same way, that finding the most talented people and then figuring out
how to use them best is the best approach to building a strong team and a
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strong organization. You have to begin with qualifications of training and
experience and so on, but very soon you get beyond that into the intangibles,
like just personality, basic intelligence, inquisitiveness, flexibility, and I look
for those kinds of things and then figure out how to assign tasks so that they
play to the strengths of the people I‟ve recruited as much as possible.
McFarlane
Would you care to give me any specific examples?
Sinding
Of great hires?
McFarlane
Yeah.
Sinding
Well, Sara Seims was a great hire.
McFarlane
And you knew that from the beginning?
Sinding
From before the beginning. Actually, Sara proved—many of my hires have
proved to be even better than I expected when I hired them, but I knew Sara
was going to be a star. I knew that hiring Lyn Thomas here was the right
thing. She was just exactly the right complement to me. Her strengths are my
weaknesses, and my strengths are her weaknesses. And now more recently
Valerie de Fillipo who‟s come on as the head of our external affairs function
is, I think, a really good hire. But there have been a lot of others along the
line, David Oot, who I hired about three different times in USAID.
McFarlane
Did you know that after five minutes, ten minutes?
Sinding
David came to Pakistan as an IDI, an international development intern, an
entry level new professional at AID, and he was assigned initially to me, and
I knew in the first ten minutes that this guy was just going to be a star, that
he had this wonderful combination of what you call sort of the social science
turn of mind. He was trained more in public health, actually, than in social
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science, but he thought like a social scientist, that and just a wonderful way
with people of all different cultures. It was just amazing to see how he
related to the Pakistanis within the first two weeks he was there and
colleagues and so on. I knew this guy was substantively very, very strong,
inquisitive, open-minded, and a wonderful personality. I just knew he was
going to go to the top, and he did. He retired from AID as the director of
the office of health. He now runs international health programs at Save the
Children, and that was a guy I just knew from the very beginning was going
to be a great person.
McFarlane
So, coming into a job like that you have a lot of confidence in your ability.
Sinding
Now I do. I didn‟t—something that develops with time.
McFarlane
And if we‟re going to have a record for the future, do you have any advice to
people doing that, in managing reproductive health programs or
management in general?
Sinding
Yeah, I think that the things that I would suggest have to do with
management in general, not reproductive health programs particularly. There
are a few things that I guess—little—I don‟t know. There‟s a word for them
that I‟m not finding but just lessons of life. One is that doctors, generally
speaking, make poor managers. They‟re not trained to be managers. They‟re
trained in fact, to take responsibility and not to delegate it, and it‟s very hard
for many doctors to overcome that. I have known some doctors who were
great managers, but generally speaking, they‟re not particularly good. So one
kind of rule is be very, very careful before you hire a doctor for a managerial
position. Another thing is that somebody who is at ease with himself or
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herself, who naturally interacts well, who is gregarious, is likely to be a better
manager than people who are loners or introverts, that I think to be a good
manager you have to have a natural interest in people and how they work
and that it‟s important in hiring people to mid-level or senior-management
positions to identify people who genuinely enjoy being with people and who
like human interactions.
McFarlane
How can you tell that during an interview?
Sinding
It‟s hard, but openness and ease of communication does come through in a
two-hour interview. You can tell—I often think I can tell—a person who
likes people and who is inquisitive and open-minded in a two-hour interview
from somebody who‟s sort of come in tense and with a script and
determined to convince you of how right he or she is for the job.
McFarlane
So, you‟re talking about fairly extensive interviewing. You‟re not talking
about ten minutes and make up your mind.
Sinding
No, you don‟t hire on that basis. I also think checkouts are really important.
I learned that from Peter Goldmark [Jr.] who was the president of the
Rockefeller Foundation who recruited me, and when I learned what Peter
had done before he made a decision to hire me I was just astounded.
McFarlane
What had he done?
Sinding
Well, he‟d called about eighteen people, at least eighteen people, and grilled
them up to an hour and a half on the telephone about me, asking them really
difficult questions like, If Steve is going to make a mistake, what is the worse
mistake you can imagine him making? What is the mistake he‟s most likely to
make? Tough, very difficult things for people to answer, and I learned after I
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joined the foundation that Peter did this for all of the key hires that he did.
And I learned one doesn‟t have to go to quite the extent that Goldmark did
but how important it is to follow up on people‟s references and then to go
one step beyond that until you find somebody who doesn‟t necessarily have
only good things to say about the candidate. But checking references is really
important and, in fact, probably more important in many cases than the
interview itself. You can learn a lot about people by what other people have
to say about them rather than how they present themselves.
McFarlane
And especially if you listen? I read that in your oral history, too, the
importance of managers listening.
Sinding
A manager who is listening, yeah. Well, I guess in the oral history I talked a
lot about something that I haven‟t done here nearly as much as I would have
liked. I think of myself less as a manager here than as a leader. It‟s a very
different kind of role from the ones I‟ve had before, and every other job I‟ve
had I really was a manager. My job was to take a program that was pretty
well established, not in the Rockefeller case but certainly in all the AID jobs
I had, and to help motivate the people who had responsibilities for different
parts of the program to do their jobs well. But it was largely people
management and to some degree intellectual leadership, but it was as much
people management as anything. At Rockefeller it started with intellectual
management and then became people management. I first had to create a
vision for the program and then get the people to do it. But at IPPF I
basically hired the people manager, my deputy, and my job is not to
supervise the staff so much as to go out and get the resources and represent
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the institution. It‟s a different kind of role. I don‟t think of myself as a
manager in the same way in this place. What I was starting to say is that in
the AID job, in the Rockefeller job, in all of the other management jobs I‟ve
had, I tried very hard to create environments—I learned this from Joe
Wheeler, what he called the mini caucus, where the people who were
reporting to me had an opportunity on a regular basis to have an exchange in
which they set the agenda and which my job basically was to listen, to react,
to learn from what they were doing. I can‟t do that here. I don‟t have the
time for it and I have to depend upon Lyn to do that and I regret it. I think
it‟s one of my strengths as a manager, and I‟m sorry that I don‟t have the
time to spend more time with individual managers and staff, helping to
develop the programs.
McFarlane
So, in an average month, what do you do here?
Sinding
Well, in an average month, I‟m only here half the time, at most. Lyn would
tell you less than that. Certainly in the first two months of this year I‟ve been
here less than half the time. So, let‟s talk about the time I‟m not here first,
what I do when I‟m not here. I visit members. In the last two months, I
visited Ethiopia. Next month I‟m going to be going to Tunisia and Morocco
and Germany. I have met with the donors in New York—some of the
donors, the foundations. I‟ve been deeply involved in meetings planning an
international conference that we‟re having in London in September.
McFarlane
The Roundtable?
Sinding
The Roundtable that I basically stimulated. I‟ve spoken at the European
Population Conference in Geneva. I‟ve met with Tim Wirth about funding
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for the Roundtable. I‟ve had meetings with the British government to talk
about increased funding for IPPF.
McFarlane
And they have provided—
Sinding
They have very substantially increased this year by a third. I went to a
meeting of the European Union and the ACP countries, the African,
Caribbean, Pacific Islands countries, to which the European Union provides
aid on their framework agreement for the next five years, in Addis [Ababa,
Ethiopia]. I‟ve done a tremendous amount of that kind of traveling:
speaking, lectures, meetings. There was a meeting at Bellagio on the
Roundtable. So, that‟s the half of the time I haven‟t been here. When I am
here, I guess my time is divided between—we had one major staff meeting
while I was here. I try on a quarterly basis to meet with all of the staff
McFarlane
Together?
Sinding
Together, yeah. We do it after every governing council meeting, and then we
try to do it twice in between the governing council meetings. I‟ll be meeting
next week or later this week with all of the managers. There are regular
meetings here in which people come in from the field for various things,
which I participate in as much as possible. There have been a lot of meetings
over the—I preside over meetings of the senior management team, which is
the senior managers here, three of them, plus the six regional directors. I
meet with people who just want to meet with me. The Clinton Foundation is
over at my office now talking about what we might do together on getting
anti-retroviral drugs into some of our national programs. I do some press,
radio interviews. (pause in recording)
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So, you‟re describing your function—are you having—is this something—
are you enjoying this?
Sinding
Yeah, I‟m really having fun. I‟m having a great time. I love living in London.
It‟s a very nice change after New York, and I‟m just so pleasantly surprised
at how much easier the challenges in this job prove to be than I anticipated
they might be. Also, the worst is over. Absolutely the worst part of this was
letting people go.
McFarlane
Coming in and letting them go.
Sinding
I knew that if I was going to make significant changes in staffing it had to be
done quickly.
McFarlane
You knew that from—
Sinding
I knew that before I got here. I didn‟t know specifically who, although in a
couple of cases I did. So, I knew that I‟d have to make relatively quick
judgments about who were the more effective and the less effective people
or where the real trouble spots were, where the real problem areas were, and
I needed to take enough time to make good judgments about that but act
swiftly enough so that I didn‟t become so attached to people or get so far
down the road that it became emotionally impossible. So, it was very
difficult.
McFarlane
Is this a new experience for you?
Sinding
Yeah, it is. I‟ve had to fire people periodically but never do a wholesale
reorganization. I‟ve been actually extremely lucky throughout my career. In
the three big management jobs that I had before this one: Office of
Population, Kenya Mission, and Rockefeller Foundation—in the first two
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cases, I inherited really good programs and really good staff, and my job was
to try to change things at the margins. In the case of the Office of
Population, there was the special issue of the assault of the Reagan
Administration and the solidarity that that external threat created but then
trying to mold the energy in constructive and positive ways and also to try to
change some of the things that I thought were most wrong with the
Ravenholt approach. But fundamentally, I thought the Office of Population
program was a great program, and it was a great group of people, and there
wasn‟t a whole lot of restructuring or restaffing that needed to be done—in
fact, very little. Same thing was true at the Kenya Mission. I took over a
fundamentally really sound strategy that had been developed by my
predecessor, and my job was to try to do the best job I could in
implementing it and getting good people as needed. But in the AID system,
there‟s this rotation. There is a natural rotating in and out, so you don‟t—
accept in egregious cases, you don‟t have to fire people. You just let them get
to the end of their tour and then get somebody better. And then at
Rockefeller, I started with a tabula rasa. Shelly Segal had left sometime before
I got there. His program had wound down, and it was a matter of building a
new population sciences strategy and hiring the people, so I was hiring more
or less from scratch. So, this is the first time I‟ve come into a really troubled
organization where part of the trouble was the people.
McFarlane
They‟d been here too long? They weren‟t—
Sinding
Some had been here too long. I cannot overstate the incompetence of my
predecessor as a manager. She made every mistake, every basic mistake you
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could make, from getting rid of strong people and promoting weak people—
Tape 1 ends; tape 2, side 1, begins.
Sinding
No, they know that‟s how I feel anyway. She was a really nice woman, and I
like her personally, and I still have a nice relationship with her. But she had
no vision, she had no background for the job, she had never worked in
reproductive health, she had never been a manager before, and she was
weak. She didn‟t stand up to the volunteers. She let them run, and so she
made all kinds of decisions that were sort of satisfying decisions—getting rid
of a problem in the short term, only to create a bigger problem in the longer
term.
McFarlane
So, political within the organizational context.
Sinding
Yeah, political without any grounding principles or core values. She had no
guidance system. She just sort of followed the course of least resistance, and
it led the institution into the quagmire. It was this unbelievable quagmire.
Everybody hated everybody else. I went to the first meeting of the senior
management team. I went to two of them, actually, before I took over. The
one thing I have to say for Ingar [Brueggemann] was that she was
enormously gracious toward me in the way in which she facilitated the
turnover, including inviting me to attend the two senior management team
meetings before I joined the organization, and I‟ve never seen such a
dysfunctional family in my life.
McFarlane
You knew that right away.
Sinding
These were ten people sitting around the table who couldn‟t stand being
with one another, and, I mean, every interaction was a hostile, aggressive
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interaction. There was no team at all.
McFarlane
Sounds like a faculty meeting. (laughs)
Sinding
Yeah, it‟s a lot like a faculty meeting. It was a lot like a program review at the
Rockefeller Foundation, people trying to one up one another and everybody
just absolutely detesting and condescending to the director general. It was
just an awful situation. So, in a sense, I had a really easy act to follow.
McFarlane
And you knew what you were getting into.
Sinding
And I knew very well. By the time I got here, I knew exactly what I was
getting into because I had—my appointment was more or less confirmed in
the fall of 2001, so I had almost a year. I had eleven months to get ready,
and in those eleven months I learned a lot about how the place worked and
what was going on. A lot of people approached me and wanted to talk about
IPPF, and so it wasn‟t hard.
McFarlane
In a sense, this is a good time to make your mark with the Bush
Administration.
Sinding
Yeah, well, they‟re an easy target, too. They‟re so dead wrong and so
outrageous in the eyes of the rest of the world in what they stand for that it‟s
not difficult to get people‟s attention simply by pointing out the reasons that
the Bush approach makes no sense. Also, Bush is himself so transparently
cynical in the way he‟s handling this whole thing. To be aggressively
pursuing one policy internationally that is at complete odds with domestic
policy makes him look as if he‟s pandering to the right wing, which he is. If
he really believed this stuff, he would be much more actively pursuing the
overturning of Roe v. Wade or a constitutional amendment in the United
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States, actions at the state and local level to undo Roe v. Wade, and I don‟t
think he‟s doing any of that.
McFarlane
You don‟t think he‟s being as aggressive as he could be on the domestic
setting.
Sinding
Not nearly because I think he knows he can‟t win.
McFarlane
Even with his judicial appointments.
Sinding
Well, he may in the long run be able to do it with judicial appointments in
the second term. He almost certainly will be able to name two or perhaps
three Supreme Court justices, and he may be able to get a court that would
overturn Roe v. Wade, but I think the Reagan Administration, and his father‟s
administration, and he all understand that politically they can‟t win this issue
domestically. And so, they‟ve thrown the international bone to the right wing
extremists, and it‟s the most cynical kind of political calculation because I
don‟t think it‟s based on any issue or principle. I give W perhaps more credit
than I do either his father or Reagan in that respect. I think Reagan as
governor of California signed an abortion liberalization law, and Bush‟s
father was actively pro-choice through most of his career until the
Republican party shifted and he shifted with it. W, as a born-again Christian
and really fundamentally much more conservative, I think, than either
Reagan or his father, may actually believe this stuff. He may be personally
opposed to abortion, although I doubt it.
McFarlane
Is that what‟s driving you? You could be—I guess that‟s one question that I
have about the previous oral history and some of the other people we talked
to. People will tell you what‟s driving them in this area.
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Yeah, it probably is what‟s driving me at this point because, to be perfectly
honest about it, what motivated me through the first thirty years of my
career was concern about overpopulation and population growth. I didn‟t
make my career as a reproductive health champion, and it was difficult for
me to adjust to the shift that occurred at the time of Cairo. I thought that it
was far too abrupt, and I still think that it would have been far better had we
been able to find the common ground between the demographic and the
reproductive health rationales for action in this field than to have so
categorically shifted from one to the other. And at the point that I left the
Rockefeller Foundation and went to Columbia, I really felt in a way as if I
was leaving the field, and most of my—
McFarlane
Leaving the population field?
Sinding
Yeah, most of my—I taught a course in population at Columbia, but I
taught three courses on international development, and the book that I
wrote while I was at Columbia was on restructuring foreign aid. It wasn‟t on
population, and my own interest, really, has shifted very substantially from
population/reproductive health to a broader set of concerns about how
development aid is administered. And I had no expectation that I would
come back to the field in part because I felt that a, the problem which I had
committed most of my career to was well on the way to being resolved, and
b, that to the extent that the field had shifted to a focus on women‟s health I
had nothing particular to contribute. I felt I had made contributions in sort
of helping to bring the field from the conflict between the Ravenholt view
and the development view to some middle point or reconciliation of the two
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different points of view. I felt that I tried very hard in the context of the
Cairo conference to do exactly the same thing: to find a reconciliation
between the point of view of the women‟s health advocates and the
population advocates by articulating the message that if you meet the
reproductive health needs of individuals, the population issue more or less
takes care of itself. That was the article that I did with Allan Rosenfield and
John Ross that was first published in International Perspectives, but, in fact,
while that position—(pause in recording). A lot of the politicians who
attended the Cairo meeting—(pause in recording). A lot of the people at the
political level who attended the Cairo conference were persuaded and, in
fact, were vastly relieved that there was an argument that brought the two
different views into some degree of reconciliation, maybe a high degree of
reconciliation. I felt that the Cairo conference itself was subsequently
characterized as a defeat for those concerned about population issues and of
victory for—(pause in recording). So, I was basically—
McFarlane
Oh, I knew what—okay.
Sinding
I was basically ready to declare my years as a population and family planning
professional over, and I was into my academic role and sort of thinking
about what I would do after the AID book was finished when this thing
came along. And what inspired me to come back, I think, was a desire to use
the bully pulpit of the IPPF job to take on the Bush Administration to try to
maintain as much as I possibly could, the momentum that I felt we had
coming out of Cairo. It‟s funny. In a way, I felt the Cairo conference
sounded the death knell for the population movement, but it inspired a new
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generation of activists on women‟s health that I thought was under assault
and attacked by the Bush Administration, and to be able to do something to
sustain that movement was enough of an inspiration to come back into the
field. But what started all of this was your question about what keeps me
going, and I have to say that the challenge of making IPPF relevant again is
time bound. I‟ll spend another two or three years at this but I either will have
succeeded or failed and I‟ll come to a certain point where I‟ll make a
decision about that and then I think I‟ll retire and do something else.
McFarlane
In your mind, what‟s the decision point?
Sinding
About two and a half years from now temporally. I think that—when I
accepted the job, I told the search committee that I would take it for three
years, not for five which is the standard term, because I wanted to come in,
help turn the organization around, and identify and perhaps recruit my
successor, but I thought that the head of IPPF actually ought to be
somebody who more reflected the demographics of the clientele and the
membership than I do. I thought a woman from the developing world
should be the head of an institution that is as international and as focused on
the problems of the developing world as this one and that I thought what
IPPF needed was in fact turnaround shock treatment that I could administer
but that was not necessarily the right thing for the long run. So, I‟ve done
the shock treatment. Actually, what I‟ve been able to accomplish in the first
eighteen months wildly exceeds my expectations. In some ways, I‟ve done in
these eighteen months what I expected would take three years. I‟ve done the
administrative reform. I‟ve done the new vision and will largely have put in
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place the new resource allocation scheme. What has to follow, of course, is
the much harder, longer-term job of capacity building, and that‟s not going
to be done in the remaining year and a half of my contract. It takes a much
longer-term commitment, and I‟m not prepared to stay around to see that
whole job done. So, in a sense, I‟ve done what I said I would come here to
do. I‟ve put in place the essential ingredients of a rejuvenation. Financially,
the rejuvenation is under way, and I think it will continue. And so, when I
talk about another two and a half years, it‟s basically the recognition that I at
least have to get a start on the capacity building side of things, on the hard
work of building up implementation power of the institution.
McFarlane
What do you mean by capacity building?
Sinding
I mean strengthening the planning and management and to some extent the
evaluation skills of the associations that comprise IPPF‟s membership so
that they make good use of the funds that we provide to them.
McFarlane
Do they know they need it? I mean how many of them?
Sinding
One hundred forty-eight at last count.
McFarlane
Do most of them know they need it?
Sinding
At some level they do. When I tell the volunteers that—
McFarlane
And the volunteers just are—
Sinding
The governing council and the—do you know how the governance system
of IPPF works?
McFarlane
Not exactly.
Sinding
Well, every national family planning association has a board, and that board
is typically comprised of the same kinds of people who are the board of
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PPFA [Planned Parenthood Federation of America] in the United States.
They are civic leaders. They are volunteers. They are people who do this
because they feel this is an important thing for them to be doing with their
non-professional lives. In some cases, it is their lives. They‟re retired or
they‟re housewives. It‟s what they do and what they‟ve committed
themselves to, but they all do it on a volunteer basis. Nobody in the
governance structure is paid. They‟re all volunteers.
McFarlane
So, they‟re not the executive directors—
Sinding
They‟re not the executive directors.
McFarlane
—of the countries.
Sinding
They are the board. Now, those boards elect representatives to the regional
councils, and the regional councils elect representatives to the governing
council. There are six regional councils. Each elects five members to the
governing council. So, the board of directors, the governing council of IPPF,
is thirty people who have reached the pinnacle of volunteerdom. They‟ve
paid their dues. They‟ve come up through the system from the national to
the regional to the international level, and we call them the volunteers as well
as call them the board. Generically, they are volunteers.
McFarlane
So, is this your first experience with the volunteer board?
Sinding
With the volunteer board, yeah. My first experience with any kind of a board
was the Rockefeller Foundation board, and it was very much a professional
board, a paid board and an independent board. What‟s so maddening about
this board is that it‟s not independent. I have absolutely no say in its
composition. It‟s very unusual for a CEO to have no input into the
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composition of the board, particularly over time, but this board comes from
the membership. In that sense, it‟s the first time I‟ve ever worked for a
federation or worked in a federation, and federation politics are just
completely different from any other kind of institutional politics, and a lot of
these people are idiots. (laughter) They don‟t know anything. They‟re wellmeaning, I think, in most cases. A lot of times, they seem to be in it for the
prestige and the international travel and the trips. They all feel at the
governing council meetings as if they have to say something, which is too
bad. And so, every question you sort of go around the table and you get
thirty comments, and 80 percent of them are either repetitive of something
that the person two people before has said or just completely drivel or
incomprehensible. If you came and sat in one of our governing council
meetings and recorded it, you would be appalled. You would really be
appalled.
McFarlane
But you‟ve been through this before you came onboard?
Sinding
No, but I sort of knew what to expect. I knew that the hardest part of the
job and the least rewarding part of the job would be the volunteer politics,
and that‟s proved to be the case. It was inherent in the design of the
institution that it could not be an efficient, grant-receiving operational
institution, and it was actually a fundamental mistake on the part of the
donors to ever assume that it could be. There was a secretary general four
s.g.‟s back named Carl Wahren, who actually would be a wonderful guy for
you to interview if you can. Carl was a real star at Swedish Sida, one of the
heroes of the Bucharest population conference, who, in part as a
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consequence of a very high-profile role that he played at Bucharest, was
offered the secretary generalship of IPPF. He succeeded—I can‟t ever
remember her first name—Henderson.
McFarlane
Julia?
Sinding
Julia Henderson. And Julia had been beloved by all and just the most
wonderful, probably the most successful secretary general that IPPF had.
But she had a personal tragedy and decided after five or six years that she
was going to go back to the States, and Carl took over, and what he
recognized was that the regions had much too much power, that the
volunteers had much too much power, and he decided to centralize. He
brought all of the regional officers into London. I think there were six then.
He brought everybody into London and tried to turn IPPF from a
volunteer-controlled association or federation into an efficiently-managed
bureaucracy, bureaucratic institution, and it cost him his job. The volunteers
got rid of him after one term because they just wouldn‟t have it.
McFarlane
Was it the regional offices that became—
Sinding
It was the regional directors, and it was the regional, but it was basically the
volunteers who felt that the secretariat was trying to take over and usurp
their authority and their power. And that may be what happens to me,
except I‟ll leave before it gets to that point.
McFarlane
So, the secretary general, though, has to find money for all these people to
travel, correct?
Sinding
All the money. They don‟t bring any money. That‟s what makes the thing so
frustrating, that I spend my every waking hour and nights and weekends
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fundraising to try to get money to support the country programs, and then
the volunteers come and say, Now we want to fly business class, and, Yemen
should get as much money as India, and that kind of stuff that life is too
short to be paying a lot of time and attention to.
McFarlane
Have you been able to mobilize the volunteers to be useful politically?
Sinding
No, they‟re not high enough quality for that. That‟s the problem. I think in
the early years of IPPF the people who were attracted to the movement were
the most intelligent, progressive people in their societies in many cases
because it was a new thing. It was like the people drawn to the
environmental movement in recent years or to the landmines issue.
Population has become an old issue, and reproductive health is not
stimulating the same kind of feeling that population did, and so the
volunteers who are now at the head of the national associations are basically
timeservers. They are people who have gotten to the top simply because
they‟ve been there forever. They‟re not the kinds of prominent leadership
individuals that were the early volunteers, and I don‟t think IPPF will ever
get back to a time when—to a situation where it attracts people of the
caliber of the original volunteers because the issue just isn‟t compelling in
the same way for young people today, the issues that IPPF deals with. To
some degree, because of the Bush Administration, we‟re able to generate
some interest and enthusiasm now, but basically it‟s a movement that‟s
dying. It‟s in it‟s—
McFarlane
Is that a realization that you‟ve come to since you‟ve been here?
Sinding
No. It‟s part of the reason that I never expected to come here. When I left
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Rockefeller and for several years before that, I had felt that the population
movement was spent intellectually and politically, and I think we‟re running
basically on momentum at this point. I think if it weren‟t for Bush, we‟d be
much further along toward our ultimate demise than we are, at least in
political terms, because I think that the combination of the success of the
movement itself in reducing fertility around the world, the absolute
preoccupation of most industrial countries with too low fertility, with belowreplacement fertility, the rise of HIV/AIDS as the crisis of the moment and
the problem that is absorbing all of the new funding in health, has rendered
what was the population movement that had sort of morphed into the
women‟s health and reproductive health movement, very marginal. And
without the macro case that the population crisis represented, there will
never be the kind of political constituency for this movement that there was
during its golden era. As a political scientist, you certainly know that
generally politicians respond to crisis and to the need to act. They rarely act
on the basis of something that‟s a nice thing to do. The population crisis was
regarded as a political imperative. It had to be responded to at least by
American politicians and many in the West. Nothing has replaced that
rationale for investment in this field since Cairo, since the end of the
population crisis.
McFarlane
When do you think it ended?
Sinding
The population crisis?
McFarlane
Yeah.
Sinding
Well, when it ended and when it was perceived to be over are two different
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things. I think it would be perceived to be over starting in 1986 with the
publication by the National Academy of Sciences of its volume of
population growth. I think that knocked the pins out from under the
intellectual case for investment in this field, at least in the United States, and
the U.S. has always been far and away the global leader on this question. And
then Ben Wattenberg and the Reagan ideologues followed with Nick
Eberstadt and others arguing that there never really was a case for investing
in reduced fertility, and if there ever was it had long since passed. And then
came the realization of the demographic collapse in Europe and Japan and
the recognition that fertility was dropping everywhere except Africa, and it
just sort of all followed. But it started in ‟86 and gradually—and the Cairo
conference, by shifting the focus from demographic pressure or population
pressure to women‟s health more or less eliminated whatever political
imperative there was for investment in this field.
McFarlane
Do you think rapid population growth is no longer an issue?
Sinding
I think it‟s an issue in a few places. I think it‟s still an issue in Africa. I think
it‟s an issue in parts of South Asia, northern India, Pakistan. That‟s about it,
and I think that the justification for investment is still—
Tape 2, side 1 ends; side 2 begins.
Sinding
—capacity of the societies to invest in productive development activities.
But I think actually the micro case, the poverty-reduction case, at this point
is a much stronger case. I think actually the strongest argument for investing
in family planning and reproductive health programs at this point outside the
intrinsic benefits for the health of women is that it enables families to
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increase the likelihood that they will escape poverty. There‟s very strong
evidence that smaller families are far likelier to break out of the poverty cycle
than large families and that given the focus on poverty reduction and the
millennium development goals, that that‟s the hook that we need to attach
the movement to, to retain any possibility of significant public resources.
McFarlane
So, do you sometimes find yourself wondering what you‟re doing here?
Sinding
If I were trying to build my career, if I were—I would be profoundly
depressed about working in this field at this point, but I‟m not. I‟m trying to
end my career with a sense of closure and accomplishment, and helping
IPPF make the transition from a largely irrelevant institution to a still
relevant institution in sort of the post-population explosion era is, to my
mind, a respectable thing to be involved in. It‟s not nearly as exciting as
trying to end the population explosion, what inspired me to come into the
field in the first place, but it‟s a respectable thing to be associated with. If I
were a young man starting my career, I wouldn‟t be working in this field. In
fact, it isn‟t a field for men anymore. There are very few men in it. You look
at who runs the organizations in what we now call the reproductive health or
sexual reproductive health and rights field, and it‟s all women. And you look
at the composition of the staffs of these organizations, and they‟re all
women. It has become a women‟s movement and perhaps quite properly so,
but it‟s no place for a young man to make his career, which is an interesting
transformation because it was a field completely dominated by men when
demography was the issue.
McFarlane
True, you can see that in this, in the project we‟re doing. We‟ve had a lot of
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kind of different takes on what happened in Cairo.
Sinding
Well, mine‟s the right one. (laughter)
McFarlane
Is that something you want to discuss now—
Sinding
Sure.
McFarlane
—or would you rather—okay.
Sinding
No, we can talk about that.
McFarlane
What was your role there, and what did you observe? And were you involved
in the prep coms [preparatory committees]?
Sinding
Yeah, I was very much involved in the prep coms. I was a member of the
U.S. delegation, and I was also the population program director at the
Rockefeller Foundation, which invested quite a lot of money in the
preparatory process for Cairo in helping people from developing countries
attend the prep coms and helping them to get on delegations and also in
supporting a lot of research and in policy dialogue on the issues leading up
to Cairo. So, yeah, I was very much a participant in the process as well as an
observer of it. One of the ways in which I participated—my participation
took its most active form in two ways. One was in trying to do this bridge
building between the women‟s health position and the population position in
the run up to Cairo.
McFarlane
So, you knew this was coming.
Sinding
Well, here‟s what happened. I finished up my AID career in Nairobi in 1990.
I came back to the States, joined the World Bank, having been away from
population for four years. As the mission director in Kenya, I was dealing
with agriculture and health and macroeconomic policy dialogue and program
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lending and all kinds of stuff. And, of course, I retained an active interest in
population and paid a lot of attention to what we in AID were doing.
Happened to be the time when fertility was falling dramatically in Kenya and
so was a very interesting and exciting time to be there to try to understand
why this was happening, but I was out of the movement. I was just focused
on Kenya. I wasn‟t paying attention to what was happening internationally,
politically, and intellectually to the movement. And what had happened
during those four years was essentially the development of the feminist
critique on population, Betsy Hartmann and Adrienne Germain and Joan
Dunlop and those who basically argued—Judith Bruce—that population
policies implemented through family planning programs, a, were too narrow.
This is basically the anti-Ravenholt critique, and b, encouraged governments
to implement coercive policies that at best were disrespectful of women‟s
health needs and at worst were actually coercive.
McFarlane
What do you think of that?
Sinding
I think it was a vast overstatement. I think that one could take the India case
and the China case and universalize them when in fact that was completely
inappropriate. There certainly were cases, particularly in Asia, where
governments paid a lot more attention to how many IUDs were inserted
than to whether women‟s health actually improved. Reducing population
growth was the priority. Women were the instrument through which that
was accomplished, and there‟s no question that had the focus been on
women‟s health rather than a reduce in population growth, programs would
have looked different and women would have liked them more. But to say
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that they were therefore useless and coercive and disrespectful of women I
think was really deeply insulting to women who were motivated to use those
services because they thought it was good for them and because it helped
them in their lives. And I think Western feminists, by focusing on the
motives of the population community, completely miss the point of whether
these services—and they were for the most part services. They weren‟t
coercive programs—were something that women wanted and appreciated. I
knew from the years I spent in the field that there were thousands and
thousands of satisfied, appreciative clients of these services. The vast
majority of women who were using them were using them because they
really thought it was good for them. So, yes, I think that there was a
mischaracterization, and I came back to the States and I was asked—I went
to the World Bank and I was asked by the World Bank to prepare a policy
paper, a new World Bank policy on population. And I wrote that paper from
the assumption that reducing population growth was a good thing and that
the Bank had an interest in doing so, and I was just flabbergasted by the
reaction that I got. What happened is that feminists in the Bank took this
document and sent it all over the country by—E-mail was just coming in,
and instantaneously this paper was in New York and all over the place and
creating a furor. Here‟s the bad old demographic rationale coming back in to
the World Bank.
McFarlane
Ironically from somebody who had challenged Ravenholt.
Sinding
Ironically from somebody who had challenged Ravenholt, right. And I was
not arguing that what the World Bank ought to do is drop condoms and pills
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from helicopters. I was arguing for a somewhat more sophisticated approach
than that, but I was arguing that reducing population growth was still a valid
development objective and that the Bank had a role to play in both financing
programs and policy dialogue in that area, and that assumption was just
roundly attacked. Larry Summers also attacked the paper on the assumption
that reducing population growth was conducive to development, so I had a
double whammy. I had the feminists after me, and I had Larry Summers
who was then the chief economist after me. Larry Summers hired Lant
Pritchett to contradict my paper in the famous article that set off that great
debate in the PDR [Population and Development Review], that the reason Lant
wrote that article was because Larry was so upset by the argument I was
making in my paper that reducing population growth was an important
element in promoting economic development. There‟s a whole other tangent
we can follow on that, leading to the book that I did with Nancy Birdsall and
Allan Kelley on Population Matters, which was the continuing outgrowth of
that whole thing that actually was inspired by a conservation with Nafis
Sadik who said to me, “We made a terrible mistake in Cairo in letting
population drop off the agenda.” (chuckles) But I‟ll come back to that. So,
we‟re talking about my role in Cairo and how I got there. So, the World
Bank experience really sobered me, and then I went to the Rockefeller
Foundation after a year at the Bank, and I didn‟t leave the Bank because I
felt unloved. I left the Bank because David Hopper, who was a member of
the board of trustees at the Rockefeller Foundation and a former senior vice
president of the World Bank, advised me that I could do much more good
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for the field from the vantage point of the Rockefeller Foundation than I
could at the Bank, and I agreed with him and accepted that advice. And so, it
was actually with great reluctance that after only a year at the Bank I resigned
the position and went to Rockefeller, but Hopper was right. The ability to
move things from a foundation standpoint is much greater than the kind of
position I had at the Bank and Fred Sai also had at the Bank where you have
no money and no staff, and you can‟t do anything without money and staff
in the World Bank. All you are is an advocate, and you may or may not be
able to change people‟s minds, but in any case it‟s a long-term proposition.
So, I went to Rockefeller, and one of the first things that happened at
Rockefeller was that there was a conference at the Ford Foundation on
family planning and women‟s health, and it turned out to be a convocation
of all of the feminists who were actively critiquing population policies. So,
Nahid Toubia was there, who became the head of Rainbow/Amanitare
which is a feminist health organization based here in London now, a
Sudanese physician. I remember her particularly vitriolic attack on AID. And
Judith Bruce and Bella Abzug, and it was the whole panoply of—Betsy
Hartmann—and I sat there with my mouth hanging open. It was sort of like
in the four years that I had been away from the field, the world had changed,
and I hadn‟t seen it. I was sort of vaguely aware of it. I knew that Betsy
Hartmann had written her book, but I wasn‟t aware of the extent to which
the intellectual atmosphere in the United States had shifted and the extent to
which the attack on family planning was real and—family planning in the
context of population policies. So, that was the backdrop to my participation
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of Cairo. I was deeply troubled by the feminist critique. I thought it was
vastly overstated. On the other hand, I recognized that it was a political
reality and that to try to fight it or to defeat it had a low probability to
success. So, what I decided to do—and it sort of came to me in an epiphany.
Pramilla Senanayake who was the head of technical programs here at IPPF
in London was in charge of organizing the fortieth anniversary program of
what was then called the members assembly. Every five years, I think, or
three years, IPPF called together all of its members, so not only the
governing council and the regional councils, but every family planning
association was invited to send a certain number of representatives.
McFarlane
More than one?
Sinding
Well, maybe only one. I don‟t know, but these were huge things. There were
hundreds and hundreds, so there probably was more than one. This one was
in New Delhi in I think November 1992. And Pram called me up and said,
“Would the Rockefeller Foundation be willing to provide some funding to
help sponsor this thing?” And I got right back to her, and I can‟t believe my
chutzpah. I said, “Yeah, we‟ll do it, but I want a place on the opening panel.”
McFarlane
(laughs) You said that?
Sinding
“I want a speaking role.” Yeah, I said that. I‟d never done that before, but I
said, “We‟ll provide the money, but I want a place on the program.” Having
done that and I then decided I‟d better have something to say, and I‟d been
thinking about this issue a lot. I had an intern—what we called a Warren
Weaver fellow at Rockefeller—named Mary Nell Wegner. Mary Nell, she‟s
acknowledged in the article. And I asked her to take a look at the population
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policies of countries which had explicit demographic objectives and then to
compare the demographic objective with what would be the demographic
outcome of meeting all of the unmet need for contraception as measured by
the DHS [demographic and health surveys] in those countries. So, it had to
be countries which had demographic policies and which had DHSs which
had permitted the measurement of unmet need. And my assumption was
that if you could show that satisfying unmet need would produce a higher
contraceptive prevalence rate than the demographic targets countries had set
for themselves, that you could make the case that we should drop
demographic targets, which, of course, was one of the major objections of
feminists to population policy.
McFarlane
Do the feminists just see the issue of demographic targets as coercion?
Sinding
Yes, they felt, and not without legitimacy, that when demographic targets
were translated into fieldworker quotas, they produced bad outcomes for
women.
McFarlane
So, that was the link.
Sinding
That was the link, and in many countries that‟s exactly what happened. India
and all of the subcontinent was a classic case that fieldworkers were expected
to produce a certain number of new acceptors or continuing acceptors or
IUD insertions or something per month in order to retain their jobs. And, in
fact, the Indonesian program operated largely along those lines, although I
think without really high degrees of what we would call coercion. A lot of
the definition of coercion, of course, is culturally relative, too, and the
Indonesian program has always been a controversial one as to whether what
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it did was coercive or not. But India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, China are the
countries where I think one could argue that fieldworker quotas translated
directly into behaviors that at best were disrespectful of women‟s health and
women‟s health needs.
McFarlane
How about Thailand?
Sinding
No, I think the Thai program was always much more demand driven, and
Thailand is just different from every place else, the way they took care of
AIDS is also different from every place else. I don‟t know what it is about
Thai culture, but there is something about Thai culture that just makes it
exceptional. I don‟t think the Thai program was ever in the least bit coercive,
but I think it was a very high quality program.
McFarlane
But the other ones you‟ve mentioned, you think there might have been
some—
Sinding
India under the emergency and China were explicitly coercive. There is no
debate about that. Bangladesh, by offering fairly substantial incentives for
sterilization acceptors, could certainly be interpreted as coercive because—
McFarlane
But that‟s debatable.
Sinding
Yeah, I think it‟s debatable. The payments were sufficiently large that one
could argue that poor women could not afford to forego them, and in
Indonesia the pressures that communities put on individuals to conform
with the family planning objectives were quite substantial. A village headman
going around ringing a bell at six o‟clock saying, “It‟s time to take your pill,”
or putting symbols on houses that showed the type of contraception that
was being used by the inhabitants could be interpreted as fairly coercive.
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Others have argued that that‟s consistent with Javanese culture and there‟s
nothing coercive about it, and so you can argue that one and the Bangladesh
one, I think, either way. If it was coercive, it was soft coercion. It certainly
wasn‟t hard coercion in the way that India and China were. But the
implementation of population policies through family planning programs
that were ethically questionable was a legitimate but vastly overstated target
of the basically feminist critics.
McFarlane
Were most of the feminist critics American?
Sinding
No, I think much of the leadership was American, but there was a lot of
support in Latin America, some in the Philippines, in India. There were
nodes—and in Europe, Dutch and Swedish activists in particular, but the
Europeans at the political level largely supported the position of the
feminists in the United States, long before the U.S. government would
acknowledge in any way that there was any substance to the feminist
critique. The Europeans were deeply uncomfortable with family planning all
along. They didn‟t like the fact that—European aid was always much more
inclined to be responsive to the demands from the developing countries
rather than like the American is sort of Congress or the administration kind
of dictates what the objectives and the purposes of aid are, and then the
administration goes out and tries to do it in developing countries. The
priorities are all established in Congress and in the administration in the
USAID case. In the European case, at least they tried to follow the rule that
they were influenced by demand. And because demand for family planning
wasn‟t very strong for most countries, certainly outside of East Asia,
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Europeans were always sort of uncomfortable. And when critiques came
along about coercion, they were inclined to accept and believe those, so the
Europeans were feeling very uncomfortable going into Cairo. And also,
interestingly, population was always an ideological issue in Europe with the
left arguing that it was taking the Marxian view, that it was a symptom, not a
cause, and the right basically taking the Malthusian view that it was a great
threat to development and security. And it was very much a left-right issue,
the socialists basically not liking population and the conservatives—and
Europe happened to be very much under the influence of socialist
governments at the time of the Cairo meeting.
McFarlane
And you would characterize that as most of Western Europe
Sinding
All of Western Europe. I can‟t think of a single exception. It was not a
deeply divisive ideological issue. There was a range of—there was more
consensus than dissensus on the issue, but to the extent that there was
division it tended to be along those lines. A minister of international
development in a socialist government in Holland who happened to think
that population growth was a really serious problem didn‟t have a lot of
opposition to investing Dutch aid in population programs. It wasn‟t that
deeply ideological like it is in the States now, but it was interesting. And if
you think about the history of the population movement in the States, it was
largely the conservative Republicans concerned about national security issues
who drove the investments in family planning and population starting with
Draper and including George Bush and the people who supported these
programs. It wasn‟t until the religious right joined the Republican coalition
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and forced a division on the issue that this became a disreputable thing from
the standpoint of the ideological right in the States. Where was I? So, I‟m
still getting up to Cairo. So, I did this article—and the response to it. I gave
it as a speech at the—
McFarlane
In New Delhi?
Sinding
Mary Nell. Mary Nell Wegner was her name. Mary Nell did the analysis. The
analysis showed that in the vast majority of the countries which met the
criteria of DHS‟s and population policies, meeting unmet need would create
much higher contraceptive prevalence rates than the targets that the
countries had set. And so, I was able in effect in the speech to say, “Let‟s
forget about demographic targets. Let‟s just do away with them. We‟ll
achieve the same objectives from a demographic standpoint by satisfying
individual need, and it‟s politically a much more acceptable way to approach
programs.” Well, the Europeans loved this. It was exactly what the
moderates in the foreign ministries and the development ministries in
Europe were looking for to solve their problem because they were
sympathetic with the feminist critique. They were uncomfortable with
pushing family planning, but if it was responding to unmet need and this was
a real thing that was measurable, that was a solution. And so, I thought that
my great contribution to the Cairo conference, actually, was this common
ground. But the feminists rejected it as being a Trojan Horse, a wolf in
sheep‟s clothing, Steve Sinding, the demographer, sort of finding a cute
political trick to continue to push the demographic agenda, and they rejected
it.
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McFarlane
Even though you‟re saying we don‟t need them.
Sinding
Even though I was saying we didn‟t need them, and so that was that side of
my participation, and that paper got a lot of play. It got sent all over Europe
even before it got published, and it became really the centerpiece of the
policy position that the Dutch, the Norwegian, the Danish, the British, and
the German governments took at Cairo, and it enabled them to find the
common ground they were seeking. On the U.S. delegation, I had a much
tougher time because there I was right up against Adrienne Germain, who
was—
McFarlane
How many people were on the delegation?
Sinding
Well, it kept growing. At the point of the—I guess the delegation really came
together at the second prep com, and at that point we were probably, oh,
fifteen.
McFarlane
And how were people selected?
Sinding
Well, Tim Wirth and his office selected them, and it was kind of a Delphitechnique approach, sort of a reputational thing. Call people you know. Ask
them to suggest people you know. Get a list together, and then try to
draw—it was very much a politician‟s approach of a very broad tent getting
as many different perspectives and interests represented as possible. So,
Bella Abzug was on it at one end of the spectrum, and I suppose I was the
other end of the spectrum. I don‟t know. There were several
environmentalists on it who never felt comfortable because
environmentalists‟ interest in population always was we really need to have
less of it so that the environment will get better, and feminists rejected them
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totally out of hand as advocating an approach that was surely going to lead
to a revival of coercive policies. Any macro case for investing in
population/family planning was rejected by the feminist critics as being
proto-coercive, and that made it very difficult to have a dialogue. Tim Wirth
ran the delegation up to the Cairo conference and in effect through the
Cairo conference, although Al Gore was actually the chair of the delegation
at Cairo. But Gore flew in the night before the conference started and flew
out three days later or something like that, and Wirth was the one who really
stewarded the process. And Wirth was very skillful politically, but in the end
I think that he was essentially prepared—
Tape 2 ends; tape 3, side 1, begins.
Sinding
—of a consensus. But that sort of leads me to the observation by Nafis a
couple of years later that gave rise to this book with Nancy Birdsall. I think
that people were—the Cairo conference had the outcome it did because the
UN had fundamentally lost control of the political process by the time of
Cairo and totally by the time of Beijing in the sense that by letting the NGOs
into the tent they increasingly marginalized the role of governments in these
deliberations. The UN conferences of the nineties increasingly became
dialogues between governments and NGOs, and which NGOs happened to
be in the tent at the time of the dialogue largely determined the outcome.
And the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation and a few other
institutions: the Swedish government, the Danish government, lavishly
financed the participation of feminist activists in Cairo. They got on
delegations; they packed the forum; they lobbied incessantly; they were
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incredibly well-organized and strategic in their approach. And the feminist
ideology came to be the core set of values of the Cairo conference, and I
think governments found themselves caught completely by surprise by that
outcome, including, to some degree, Tim Wirth. And I know that Nafis was
caught by surprise. (pause in recording)
McFarlane
This is March 16, day two of the Steven Sinding interview. We left off
yesterday during a discussion of your perception of Cairo, and you made two
major points that I saw. Any macro case for investing in population/family
planning was rejected by the feminist critics as fundamentally coercive, and
that the UN had fundamentally lost control of the political process by the
time of Cairo and even more so in Beijing. Maybe you could explain a little
more about losing control of the political process.
Sinding
Starting really with the environmental conference in Rio in ‟92, which was, as
I recall, the first of the great series of global conferences of the nineties. The
civil society began to demand access to the political process. As I recall in
Rio—I wasn‟t there, but there was kind of an NGO forum that was created
outside the official conference with a series of tents for different groups,
different interests, and what came out of those tents was very concerted
lobbying that carried over from the forum into the conference itself and
played quite an important role in determining the outcome. This was very
different from my recollection of the role of the NGOs at Mexico City or at
Bucharest or in any of the UN conferences on global issues that preceded
that series of conferences in the nineties, in the sense that the very strong or
high barrier that had existed between governmental delegations, sitting and
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negotiating language and civil society institutions or NGOs, began to
crumble in the nineties. I think that the UN quite unwittingly by acceding to
the demands of the NGOs increasingly through the nineties created an
environment in which the NGOs themselves became very significant actors
in the political process. I know that in many instances the NGOs—that the
UN encouraged governments to put NGOs on their delegations. I know
that in the Cairo process there was an explicit request from Nafis Sadik to
governments to allow NGOs to participate in the national delegations, and
some countries like Bangladesh came with very large delegations which were
principally staffed with NGOs. There was a really important meeting, and I
don‟t remember the date of it exactly, but I had a fairly significant role to
play in it. The feminist establishment in women‟s health, which I would
characterize as Joan Dunlop and Adrienne Germain and Carmen Barroso
and José Barzelatto at the Ford Foundation, Frances Kissling, Sonia Correa,
Sandra Kabir, a number of people who were global activists on the women‟s
health agenda were quite concerned that as planning was going forward for
the ICPD [International Conference on Population and Development], it
looked as if Nafis was going to have an NGO forum that was somewhere
quite separate both temporally and physically from the conference, that she
was going to follow the model that had been true at Bucharest and at Mexico
City of an NGO forum that was really quite separate, an event for the
NGOs that was not connected organically to the conference or the
substance of the conference itself. And I know that that group of people—
not just women, as I say, Barzelatto and Steve Viederman, who was the
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president of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, he was very much a part of
that group and that movement—were concerned about that. They wanted to
put pressure on Nafis to create an environment in which the NGOs could
much more actively participate with governments. And Carmen Barroso,
who at the time was the population program director at the MacArthur
Foundation, decided to convene a meeting to which Nafis would be invited
at which this group would make a representation to her to think about the
ICPD in a very different way from the way conferences before that had been
managed. Jyoti Sing, who was Nafis‟ principal advisor and the sort of
executive director of the ICPD itself and in many ways the guy who made it
work operationally. Jyoti was very much a traditionalist and very much
opposed to the idea of active NGO participation. He was a UN traditionalist
who thought that UN conferences were about governments sitting down
and negotiating language and that the NGOs should not be a significant part
of that, but Nafis listened to the argument around the table. The reason I
played a significant role is that I think I was responsible for getting her there.
I don‟t think she would have gone if I hadn‟t encouraged her to go.
McFarlane
She would have ignored them?
Sinding
Yeah, or she would have sent Jyoti, or she would have found a way not to
have that meeting, but I think I persuaded her that it was a good thing to do
and that they were worth listening to. And I know that she trusted me and
she didn‟t trust most of the rest of them, so I think that‟s why it happened.
Anyway—
McFarlane
Did you go?
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Yeah, I was there, and it was a very interesting and a very good meeting.
Basically, what the group said is there is a very important voice that has
developed in the decade between Mexico City and Cairo that you need to
hear and that needs to be heard in the debate, and if the NGOs are not
present and are not part of it that voice will be drowned out by the
traditional concerns of governments. And Nafis was and is a sufficient
feminist that she was moved by that. I think she in essence overrode the
advice that she was getting from Jyoti and others, and she decided at that
meeting or very shortly thereafter to open up the process. And it was not
long after that that she wrote the letters of the governments, encouraging
them to have NGOs on the delegations, and at both prep com two and pre
com three that‟s what happened. I guess there was a fourth prep-com, too.
My memory is vague. I think there was a final, kind of procedural, prep com,
but the big one was the third. That‟s where the major structure of the
conference was agreed to and the principal content. The fourth one, I think,
was largely ironing out some wrinkles. Most of those wrinkles were
important. They had to do with all the bracketed language, which, as you
know, was very substantial coming out on the third prep com, but it was
prep com three, which I think was in April of ‟94, that was the critical one.
And I remember very clearly that it was really heavily influenced by the
women‟s caucus, and the women‟s groups met every morning in Conference
Room D or 3 or something like that in the bowels of the secretariat building
and conspired. They basically sat together and said, This is the language
that‟s coming up today. What do we want to have in it? And they then
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agreed on language, and they fanned out through the delegations and
lobbied really hard. And through the U.S. delegations and the European
delegations principally with selected delegations from the G-77, from the
developing countries, they got the language. The most powerful voices, as I
recall, in addition to the United States, were Britain, the EU speaking as one,
Sweden, which was speaking independently as I—I think I have that right.
I‟m sort of trying to remember who the progressive voices—the voices that
were carrying the feminist agenda were. From the developing world, India
was—I think—South Africa. There were some others, but it was mainly the
Western powers.
McFarlane
What do you think about this involvement of NGOs in UN policy-making?
Sinding
I don‟t look at it in normative terms. I basically look at it in historical terms.
I think it was historically inevitable. It was reflective of what was happening
to the world, what is happening to the world, but certainly what was
happening in the nineties and opening up. It was consistent with the fall of
the Iron Curtain, the collapse of communism, the tremendous outburst of
enthusiasm for the role of private, voluntary, non-governmental institutions,
the end of central planning and the triumph of laissez-faire capitalism is all
consistent with this kind of opening out and the elimination of the
monopoly that governments had on international politics.
McFarlane
So, do you foresee that NGOs are going to continue to have more and more
of a voice?
Sinding
Well, I think this was a big breakthrough. I don‟t know that it‟s sort of a
linear process. I suspect that there will henceforth be ebbs and flows. There
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will be times when the NGOs have more authority. I think we‟re seeing a bit
of a reaction against that flowering of NGO power in the nineties now. I
think that one of the reasons that there is not much enthusiasm for big UN
conferences is that governments are a little tired of being so strongly
influenced by non-governmental institutions in this process, and so they
decide one way to avoid the problem was to just not to create opportunities
like these conferences for this to happen. I think that the strong reaction
against the anti-globalization forces, the anti-G-7, -G-8 forces has also
frightened governments, that the violence at Seattle and of that series of
three or four meetings right around the turn of the millennium also made
governments more chary about doing this sort of thing. But it‟ll come back,
and I did say at the time that the NGO genie was out of the bottle. Once it
was out and part of the process, there was no way putting it back in again.
So, I do think that it was a breakout, that there‟s no going back to the prenineties system of sort of closed meetings of governments. I think the
NGOs will forever—looking forward, the civil society will be playing a
much more integral role in these kinds of global policy discussions than
heretofore.
McFarlane
Well, during this meeting or during the process leading up to and in Cairo,
reproductive health replaces family planning and population. Is that a fair
characterization?
Sinding
Absolutely.
McFarlane
For you, reproductive health services versus family planning, are those just
terms, or what do you think?
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No. Reproductive health, there‟s a definition of reproductive health that‟s
quite clearly written in the Cairo document that explains the difference
between family planning as it was before and reproductive health afterward.
Reproductive health, a, includes HIV/AIDS prevention and other STD
[sexually-transmitted diseases] prevention and treatment programs. It
includes emergency obstetrical care and safe labor and delivery services. I
guess those are the main expansions of it. There was a lot of
misunderstanding after Cairo, that reproductive health also meant women‟s
empowerment, that it meant female education and literacy programs, that it
meant gender equality and—which it doesn‟t. That‟s the development part
of the population and development theme, but reproductive health means
family planning plus STD, HIV/AIDS and safe obstetrical care and
associated maternal and child health, women‟s health and child health,
immunization programs and other primary care programs that impact
directly on maternal mortality and infant-child mortality.
McFarlane
Did that change affect your programming at Rockefeller, or had it already
gone in that direction?
Sinding
Well, it certainly affected the vocabulary. I mean, we had been talking—our
population program strategy before Cairo was meeting unmet need for
family planning and contraceptive services to complete the demographic
transition. That was a very old-fashioned, pre-Cairo formulation. We
changed that after Cairo. We talked about reproductive health services and
programs. We talked about the benefits of such services for women‟s health
and empowerment of lives and families‟ livelihoods rather than completing
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the demographic transition.
McFarlane
So, it did change.
Sinding
So, yeah, we did change. It changed everybody‟s programs.
McFarlane
In fact or in speaking about them?
Sinding
No, I think in fact. You can‟t change the language that radically and not
change the substance of programs. We did much more grant-making after
Cairo that was supportive of the women‟s health agenda. It wasn‟t a radical
or a sudden transformation, and I would argue that our program was largely
supportive of Cairo, even if that formulation and language wasn‟t precisely
supportive of Cairo. In substance, the program was supportive of the Cairo
agenda before Cairo. In our contraceptive research and development area,
for example, we had adopted very much the feminist agenda of womencontrolled methods, of male methods, of methods that will protect against
STDs as well as against unwanted pregnancy. We had developed a very
strong program focused on young people and services for youth, which was
a major theme of Cairo.
McFarlane
Did that come from you, or was it coming from a number of corners?
Sinding
Within the Rockefeller program? We‟re talking about the Rockefeller
program.
McFarlane
Yeah, but did you end up influencing Cairo with that priority, do you think?
Sinding
Not much, no. I think we were one among several organizations that had
identified services for young people as a major priority and dealing with the
reproductive health needs of the largest generation ever as a high priority,
both from a demographic and from non-demographic perspectives, but lots
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of organizations were on the youth wicket before Cairo and carried that
through Cairo. Our particular focus was operations research. We were
supporting some very interesting experimental programs and designs to see
what actually worked in trying to get services and information to young
people in terms of the reproductive behavior of youth.
McFarlane
What do you mean by operations research?
Sinding
Well, it‟s a term that has been corrupted, actually, by the—operations
research had a very different meaning in its original definition. But what I
mean is what the reproductive health community or the population
community calls operations research, which is basically action research.
It‟s—
McFarlane
See if it works?
Sinding
—program research. See if it works, yeah, but it is quasi-experimental in the
sense that you use both experimental and control populations and you try to
see the differences, and it‟s—there is some scientific method to it. It‟s not
just demonstration projects and pilot activities.
McFarlane
But yet it has been used in a variety of ways.
Sinding
Right.
McFarlane
Now here at IPPF, the term sexual and reproductive health has been used.
Where did the sexual get added on?
Sinding
Cairo Plus Five. That came in the Cairo Plus Five meeting.
McFarlane
Tell me about that.
Sinding
Well, I think it was—it has its origins, and I‟ve only been able to piece this
together in recent years because it—I sort of—I was part of the U.S.
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delegation for the Cairo Plus Five meeting, but my heart wasn‟t in it. I had
just left Rockefeller. I was in the process of leaving Rockefeller, actually. It
was ‟99. I left Rockefeller under very unhappy circumstances and was rather
demoralized, and to be honest I hate these big international meetings
(McFarlane laughs) and I hate the process. I hate the lobbying and the
delegations meeting with each other and haggling over words, and I just—as
much as Adriane Germaine absolutely thrives on and loves that stuff, I hate
it. So, I just opted out. I went to the first, maybe the second prep com for
Cairo Plus Five. I went to the Hague Forum, which I enjoyed. But when it
came to the meeting itself in June ‟99, I was on my way out the door, and I
just went through the motions. I wasn‟t part of it, and I wasn‟t really paying
much attention to what was going on ideologically or philosophically or
intellectually. But what was going on was, I think, two really important new
areas of thought. One had to do with the connection between sexuality and
AIDS, that you couldn‟t deal with AIDS if you didn‟t deal with sexual
behavior. And there was, I think, a realization that for years family planning
had dealt with population as if sex had nothing to do with it.
McFarlane
Take your pill.
Sinding
Yeah, just never talked about human sexuality. You can‟t talk about AIDS
without talking about sexual behavior and in quite explicit terms. So, I think
that‟s part of the reason that it happened. The other part of the reason, I
think, was that communities that were not heterosexual wanted recognition.
They wanted a recognition of the rights of homosexuals, and there is within
the feminist movement a fairly large constituency of lesbians who wanted
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through the discussion of sexuality a legitimization of non-conventional
sexual relations. And so, I think those two factors played a big role. The
same groups that had dominated Cairo dominated Cairo Plus Five, perhaps
even more so, because governments really played much less active a role.
Cairo Plus Five tended to be governments who were represented by their
UN missions rather than by people coming from the capitals. So, the
political actors were acting under instructions from headquarters rather than
being actively participatory, and that inevitably gives the NGOs even more
influence because they are the ones who actually know what they want and
what they‟re talking about. So, in Cairo Plus Five, there was significant
progress made. The whole sexual and reproductive health language was
added, and rights became a much more significant part. So, it‟s not just
sexual, but it‟s also rights. It went from reproductive health, RH, to SRHR,
sexually and reproductive health and rights, and so you went from two to
four.
McFarlane
What‟s the rights part other than recognizing gay and lesbian sex?
Sinding
Well, it‟s also—I think it‟s about the rights of young people to information
and services. It‟s about asserting the right of all individuals to access to the
information, a means to manage their reproductive health.
McFarlane
Where did that come from? The NGOs or as a group?
Sinding
Well, it came principally from the NGOs, and the human rights language
came from the human rights wave that was building all through the nineties.
I mean, it was a coalescing of several kind of global things that were
happening. Can we take a break here for a second?
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Sure. (pause in recording) I wanted to follow up on a comment that you
mentioned yesterday by Nafis Sadik about Population Matters and we
shouldn‟t have given that away at Cairo and ask you to explain that a little
bit.
Sinding
Well, Nafis and I are old friends and good friends and have been colleagues
since the seventies, and in the months and weeks after Cairo we would
occasionally meet one place or another. And Nafis would frequently say to
me little side comments about, “Yes, yes, Cairo was a great triumph. Yeah, it
was a great consensus, but,” she said, “I worry that we let the reproductive
health emphasis overwhelm the traditional concern with population.” And
she was worried about that, and then there was a particular event. The
Rockefeller Foundation got a new president, a guy named Gordon Conway,
who it turned out subsequently, was the death knell of the population
program at Rockefeller, but I didn‟t know it at the time. Very early in
Conway‟s presidency, maybe the first month or so that he was in New York,
I organized a meeting for him to meet three of the women for whom I had
the highest regard in the population movement: Nafis, Maggie CatleyCarlson, who was the president of the population council at the time. By the
way, is George Zeidenstein on your list?
McFarlane
No.
Sinding
He must be. You must talk to George Zeidenstein.
McFarlane
Okay.
Tape 3, side 1 ends; side 2 begins.
Sinding
The other one was Nancy Birdsall, who at the time was, I think, the
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executive vice president of the Inter-American Development Bank. Nancy
had been the—she was the principal author of the World Bank‟s 1984 world
development report on population, which was probably the seminal
document in the field for a long time. Nancy was also a major figure, a major
influence in the bank on various subjects and is now the president of the
Center for Global Development in Washington, which is the successor,
really, to the Overseas Development Council as the principal public interest
group concerned with international development in the U.S. Anyway, these
three women, to my mind, were the three most influential people outside of
the feminist community in the field, and I thought it was important that
Conway meet them. So I arranged this dinner in New York, and we all got
together. And at that meeting, Nafis repeated for the whole group her
concerns about—this must have been in mid-1997, maybe late 1997. She
repeated her concerns about the oversight at Cairo, or the fact that she and
others had not paid enough attention to the fact that population was
disappearing from the agenda in the course of the conference and of the
preparatory process of the conference and that it was too bad that
population had sort of gotten lost, concerns about the macro issues and
about global population growth. And she said, in particular, we haven‟t paid
enough attention to the economists, who we lost in 1986 with the
international academy report that I mentioned yesterday, and couldn‟t we do
something about that? Well, I had become aware, was aware, of a growing
revisionism in the thinking of economists about the relationship between
population growth and economic development, that there was new literature
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that was beginning to emerge from the likes of Allan Kelley and David
Bloom, in particular, and Jeffery Williamson of Harvard, that was reexamining in a much more sophisticated way than it had ever been looked at
before, the relationship between population growth and economic
development. And Nancy was sitting there, and I said, “Maybe Rockefeller
should sponsor a meeting which would bring together the leading thinkers in
development economics who are concerned with population questions and
see whether there‟s been a change in the state of the arts since ‟86.” And
Nafis said, “That‟s a great idea. Let‟s work together on that.” So, we did, and
in November „98, we held the Bellagio meeting, which brought together
about twenty, I guess, of the leading development economists who were
thinking about demographic economic relationships. And it was really quite
amazing how strong a consensus there was among that group that in fact
intellectually the world had changed, that development economics was
looking at the relationship differently, or at least the people on the cutting
edge of research on these questions were looking at the relationship quite
differently, both with respect to the macro relationship—that is, does rapid
population growth inhibit economic growth—and the micro relationship,
does high fertility inhibit the capacity of families to escape poverty? Is there
a relationship between high fertility and poverty? And at both levels, the
results of the research that was presented at the meeting were quite
compelling and so much so that Nancy and I decided after the conference
that we should collect the papers. We should ask the authors to revise and
perfect their papers so that they could appear in a volume, and they did. Two
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years later it came out as—it was a volume called Population Matters published
by Oxford, and it has had, I think, a significant impact on thinking among
intellectuals and academics, including, I think, sort of the policy community
of the World Bank about the relationship. It was very much at that audience
that we were aiming this whole thing because they were the great skeptics
about the macro relationship. As I said yesterday, I think that the
ambivalence of the National Academy Committee of 1986 did more to
damage the global case for investment in population programs than any
other single publication. And since I had played a very major role in the
production of that document, of that 1986 report—wouldn‟t have happened
if I hadn‟t commissioned it—I felt a profound sense of responsibility to
correct the historical record if there was an empirical case for doing so.
McFarlane
Now the Rockefeller years started out—you really got to develop the
program from the ground up. Did you know what you were going to do
when you got there?
Sinding
Yeah, absolutely, in fine detail. It took me about a year to recruit the staff
around whom I could build the program, but I knew from the day I arrived
where I thought Rockefeller should be positioned and where I thought we
could make a difference in program terms.
McFarlane
And how long were you—
Sinding
And it was regarded, I must say, as the most coherent, interesting, and
effective program at the foundation during the first six or seven years I was
there.
McFarlane
(speaking at same time) You were there eight years?
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Sinding
I was there eight years.
McFarlane
Can you tell me basically the pillars of the program? I know this is somewhat
repetitious of your previous—
Sinding
Well, I had three. As I mentioned, the program was organized around the
theme of meeting the unmet demand for family planning to complete the
demographic transition, which was essentially where I was trying to push the
Bank. I became—I remember when I was in Kenya, Charlie Westoff sent me
an article on—it was written by John Cleland and Chris Wilson, and it was
called something about [“Demand Theories of the Fertility Transition:] An
Iconoclastic View.” It was published in Population Studies, which is a British
Journal, and subsequently republished in several anthologies, and it really
had a very strong impact on my thinking because Cleland essentially made
the case that from DHS data it was very clear that there was a large
international unmet need for family planning. And so, I started delving into
the unmet-need literature and what was emerging from all of the DHS‟s
around the world. (coughs) Excuse me. (pause in recording) I became
convinced—and this was part of my own intellectual transition from my
anti-Ravenholt views to basically concluding that Ravenholt was
fundamentally right, that there was such a large unmet demand by women to
control their fertility around the world that the problem was essentially a
supply problem, supply broadly defined, not just contraceptives on
doorsteps but a service delivery and information challenge as opposed to a
demand-creation challenge. I was not silly about this. I didn‟t argue that the
demand was as great in Chad as it was in Java. But I continued to believe
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that there was an important relationship between the level of development
and in particular the empowerment for women and demand for family
planning. But I thought that there was now evidence from enough countries
in enough different parts of the world that if you made good services
available it would have a real impact on fertility, that we could no longer
ignore the supply-side hypothesis. And so, by the time I got to the World
Bank and largely based on my experience in Kenya and what I saw
happening—
McFarlane
Where you saw that transition.
Sinding
—I saw the transition and how rapidly it could occur and how rapidly it
occurred in an environment in which if anything, development indicators
were getting worse rather than better. I wrote a paper on that, by the way,
which I still think is one of the most interesting papers I‟ve written, although
I never really tried to get it published. It did get published in a book of a
collection of lectures that North Carolina put out, but it was—I was looking
at the case of Kenya. It was called something like “The Demographic
Transition in Kenya: A Portent for Africa?”. And what I argued in that and
what I began to see in Kenya was how important public policy is and how
important in particular the utterances of political leadership are in changing
not only the values of the population at large but in particular the behavior
of the bureaucracy in the allocation of values. When the president says,
“Family planning is really important,” it‟s really astounding to see how
district level officials change the way in which they spend their time and their
resources, and that‟s what happened in Kenya. It was a combination of
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things. You had such high fertility that Kenyans were seeing within one
generation viable farms being subdivided into nonviable units. Kenyans saw
that investing in the education of their children was fundamental to upward
mobility and that the only way they could do that was by limiting the number
of children, that there was a real trade-off between quality and quantity. And
I saw in Kenya by traveling around the country and talking to Kenyans just
an incredible value change regarding children that occurred within one
generation, that within one generation you saw Kenyans move from an
eight-child family to a two- or three-child family. It was just amazing, and
this was in rural areas, among the Kikuyu in particular, but other ethnic
groups as well. So, I really became convinced on the basis of the aggregate
data that were coming out of the DHS and my own experience in Kenya that
the focus over the next fifteen years from that time, say, 1990 onward, really
needed to be on meeting unmet need. And that‟s what I pushed at the Bank,
and that‟s how I got in trouble at the Bank. Lant Pritchett said, “There is no
such thing as unmet need. In fact, the term itself has no meaning to
economists,” and with Larry Summers and with the feminists because it
sounded like the old family planning, Ravenholt supply-side push, which to a
degree it was because I really had become convinced that, as I say, he was
fundamentally right. He was wrong in some of the particulars; he was right
in the big picture. And he was certainly wrong in the way he chose to pursue
tactically his goals, but anyway, that‟s another story. So, from the Bank, I
took to the Rockefeller Foundation the notion that we ought to build a
program that addressed this primary question, and we did it in terms of three
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different program emphases. The first one, and the largest, was basically
policy research and advocacy. It was to support research that I believed
would reinforce the essential case for committing additional resources to
meeting unmet need, that if we could mobilize more money from the
industrialized countries and from the developing countries to expand the
availability of family planning services it would have a real pay-off in terms
of fertility reduction because of the existing latent demand. And then there
were two other components, which I mentioned. One was the focus on
youth, dealing with the special problem of the largest generation ever and
wrestling with the question, how does one effectively address the
reproductive health needs of that population? And the third piece was
contraceptive technology, which had always been a very important part of
Rockefeller‟s program and where I thought as a foundation we continued to
have credibility and some comparative advantage, not in directly supporting
research because the costs of biomedical research are just so enormous, but
through the convening power and the setting of the agenda for research
which foundations often can do quite effectively, and which Rockefeller in
particular could do because of the prestige of the name and the history of
the foundation. And I recruited just an absolutely superb staff to help with
this program. One was Sara Seims, who ran the policy research and advocacy
program. Second was Jane Hughes, who really came out of nowhere, who
ran the youth research program. And the third was Mahmoud Fathalla who
had been the director of the human reproduction program at WHO, a very
prominent Egyptian ob/gyn and academic who did a fabulous job of putting
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together a program basically of research and research advocacy in the
contraceptive area. And then the fourth—there were two other members of
the staff initially. One was Parker Mauldin who was a very distinguished,
now deceased, demographer who had been with the Population Council as
the vice president for many years and was with Sheldon Segal, my
predecessor at Rockefeller, and I kept Parker on as just a wise head and a
very good researcher and very interested in kind of documenting what was
happening internationally in this area. And the last one was Cheikh Mbacké,
a Senegalese demographer who I hired from CERPOD [Center for Applied
Research on Population and Development] in Mali, which was a USAIDfunded training and research center in demography in West Africa. And
Mbacké was one of the real stars among the African fellows at Penn
[University of Pennsylvania] in the demography program there, and he went
to Nairobi and worked out of the Nairobi office on special programs in
Africa and for Africa. That was a great group, and it was a great program,
and I think it was widely acknowledged within the foundation community to
be one of the two or three strongest population programs—maybe the
strongest population program—in the foundation world. This was before
Gates and Packard became great big donors. Rockefeller was one of the
largest and one of the most influential and as much because of the quality of
the staff as because of the size of our portfolio. We just had enormous
influence in the field, and as I say, I think it was—the program was regarded
by the board of trustees and the officers of the foundation as the strongest
program—or one of the two strongest programs, the other being
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agriculture—in the foundation.
McFarlane
What happened?
Sinding
Lincoln Chen and Gordon Conway happened, and they killed the program
for different reasons, Chen because he couldn‟t—maybe you should ask
him. I think you should ask him, actually. His story would be that my
program was a pre-Cairo program and the world had changed and we hadn‟t
changed with it, and it was time for a new, sort of post-Cairo orientation. I
don‟t think Lincoln wanted the population program to end or to be
downgraded, but he wanted me out of there. I think there was a level of
personal rivalry and animosity that motivated him more than anything else.
McFarlane
That must have been depressing.
Sinding
It was very depressing, and what was so interesting was that Lincoln was
hired to replace Ken Prewitt, who along with Peter Goldmark had recruited
me. Lincoln was recruited by Peter Goldmark with the suggestion that he
was the heir apparent when Peter left within a year or two. So, Lincoln came
in. Lincoln had been a competitor with Goldmark for the presidency of the
Rockefeller Foundation eight years earlier and had not—he came in second
in the competition. John Evans who was the chair of the board was a huge
fan of Lincoln Chen and encouraged Peter to stay in touch with him, and
Peter did. And in various ways, Lincoln was involved both with the
population program before I got there and with the health program even
during the years I was there as an adviser and so on. He was always sort of
around. And when Prewitt left, Goldmark really aggressively recruited him, I
think, with Evans‟ help, although Evans had stepped down as chair at that
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point or by that point. But Lincoln came in, and we had a fairly decent
modus vivendi during the first year that Lincoln was there because Peter was
still there, and Peter was very much my fan and protector. He was a big fan
of the population program. We did something, though, in that year that I
think Lincoln just hated, and it had a lot to do with what happened
subsequently. In ‟94, Clinton lost control of both houses of Congress, and
the Republican Congress began to attack in the way Republicans have been
since Reagan, the USAID population program. It came under serious assault
from the [Capitol] Hill. That had never happened before. It had always been
from the administration, and it is now again from the administration as well
as from the Hill. It‟s worse now than it‟s ever been because for the first time
there‟s a unified Republican government majority. It‟s only the Senate, in a
way, that sort of had the finger in the dike against the total destruction of the
program. That‟s a whole other—anyway, I was deeply concerned, of course,
when the Republicans came in about the assault on the program and what—
and with Peter‟s encouragement decided—and also Angela Blackwell, who
was the other vice president along with Lincoln Chen, encouraged to
produce a monograph, a study, a report, in effect—not a monograph or
study, a report on the importance of the U.S. investment in population and
what the consequences of disinvestment in this field would be. We called it
“High Stakes [: The United States, Global Population and Our Common
Future”], and it was a widely admired by the population community. We got
a lot of press, and people thought it was a great report. It was basically
pulled together by a woman named Laurie Mazur who was sort of a contract
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writer but had been working in this field for a while and really understood
the issues, and she did a wonderful job as a writer. And it was coordinated
by Susan Sechler who had been a key figure in the Cairo delegation working
with Tim Wirth. Susan had been the population program officer at Pew
[Charitable Trusts] during the brief period that Pew had a population
program, and she was a favorite of Tim Wirth‟s for a time. And we hired her
to—when Pew let her go, we hired her to help coordinate the work for
“High Stakes.” So, it was basically an effort of I and my staff, Susan Sechler,
and Laurie Mazur, and it was really a very nice piece of work. But I have to
pause here, and this goes to this issue that I was mentioning right at the
beginning of the difference between the New York perspective and the
Washington perspective on population. The New York perspective on
population always was that Washington was much too gung-ho about the
supply side and didn‟t pay enough attention to development issues and the
deeper, broader, underlying commitments and investments that needed to be
made in human well-being in order to create the conditions for fertility
decline. And there was a deep-seated antipathy toward USAID in particular
as the symbol of wrong-headedness in public policy on population that
carried from Ravenholt right on through. I actually got a bit of a respite
from that because I was seen as sort of the savior of the program in the
Reagan years and known to be a Ravenholt adversary by the New York
crowd, so I got an easier treatment. But when Duff Gillespie took over or
Joe Speidel before me, they were viewed as Ravenholt acolytes who just sort
of maintained the same supply-side commitment. And the Population
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Council of which Lincoln Chen was a part and Harvard and the Rockefeller
and Ford foundations, that whole sort of northeast establishment was very
much down on USAID. Joan Dunlop who had been a personal advisor to
John D. Rockefeller III and then was head of the International Women‟s
Health Coalition was part of that. Adrienne Germaine was part of that. I
mean, there was sort of an intellectual tradition. Judith Bruce, Anrudh Jain,
the whole Population Council crowd, and George Zeidenstein were all part
of the group that had this deep-seeded skepticism about the Washington
view. Well, when I emerged at Rockefeller, not only as an AID guy, albeit a
more enlightened one than most, and I think that‟s what people thought of
me as: an AID guy but not a bad one, enlightened in comparison with the
Neanderthals like Ravenholt. When I emerged as a defender of USAID in
“High Stakes,” this really brought out the knives. There was a dinner that
was organized at the Rockefeller foundation by Alice Ilchman, who was the
incoming chair of the board, president of Sarah Lawrence College, and
longstanding member of the Rockefeller Board and a good friend of mine,
actually, then and now. Alice organized a dinner of prominent women in the
health and population fields in New York to meet Lincoln Chen‟s wife,
Marty, who never moved to New York. Lincoln moved to New York from
Harvard to take up his new post as vice president for international programs
at Rockefeller. Marty never moved to New York, but Alice organized this
dinner to introduce Marty to the New York group. And at that dinner were
people like Joan Dunlop and Maggie Catley-Carlson and Peggy Dulany who
was David Rockefeller‟s daughter and a member of the board of the trustees
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of the foundation and Elizabeth McCormack who was going back onto the
Pop Council Board and had been a Rockefeller family advisor and supporter
for many years, these very prominent New York women. And at that dinner,
Joan Dunlop launched a wholesale attack on “High Stakes” and really
shocked the group. Maggie Catley-Carlson who was a good friend of mine
and is a good friend of mine and was still the relatively new president of the
Pop Council rose to the defense of the Pop Sciences program and so on, but
it was a nasty episode among influential people, and it happened just before
Peter Goldmark announced his decision to resign as president of the
foundation. When Goldmark stepped down, I mean, it was like night and
day. From the day Goldmark left, which was like the day before Christmas,
until the day I came back from my Christmas break, the world changed.
Lincoln turned from a friendly critic, but supporter of the program into an
enemy. He came after us, hammer and tongs, and I‟m convinced that he was
an important influence on Gordon Conway. Conway—this whole story is
sort of interesting. Lincoln had been the Ford Foundation country
representative in India. Conway was his successor. When the search for the
new president of the Rockefeller Foundation was going on, Lincoln came
into my office one day wearing a really well-tailored brown suit. Usually
Lincoln wore academic garb. If he wore a coat and tie, it was a very unusual
day, and he never wore a nice suit. And, in fact, he wore Mao jackets and
walked around barefoot much of the time. Came into my office wearing this
brown suit, and I said, “Wow, this must be an important day.” And he said,
“Well, I‟m meeting with the search committee.” And I said, “Ahh.” And he
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said, “Yeah, I decided to throw my hat into the ring. There‟s this guy
Conway who would just be a disaster.” And I thought, “Ah hah!”
Tape 3 ends; tape 4, side 1, begins.
Sinding
A few months later the board of trustees were meeting in Bellagio at one of
our regular every-two-year Bellagio trustees meetings. And at that meeting
Lincoln was told that he was out of the running, as was Angela Blackwell,
and the two of them were just totally devastated. They disappeared. Lincoln
stayed in his room for the next three days, didn‟t join anybody for meals. It
was really awful. It was cruel. It‟s no way when—and while all that was gong
on, Conway was secretly flown in to Bellagio for a final interview with the
board of trustees, and the decision was made to hire him. So, Lincoln,
having—I don‟t know in how many people he confided his contempt for
Conway, very few, I suspect. Lincoln was then faced—I think this was just
before Christmas. It was a December board meeting. Lincoln then had to
decide what he was going to do, and every Christmas he and Marty went off
to India. And I think they did that this time, and when he came back from
his two weeks or three or whatever it was in India, he obviously had made a
decision that he was going to try to make this work. And there was then a
four-month period during which Lincoln was not the acting president, but
he was in effect—because Angela Blackwell announced immediately her
decision to resign, and so she was on her way out. So, there was no choice.
Alice Ilchman was kind of the acting president. She was board chair and she
had an office but she really depended on Lincoln to run things. And Lincoln
took it upon himself to organize the foundation to make Conway‟s transition
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comfortable and smooth, and he was the good deputy like out of Central
Casting. And I was just so amused by this, this guy who had dripped
contempt for Conway now being the good soldier. But I think what
happened during that four-month period was that Lincoln spent a lot of
time with Conway, both on the phone and going back and forth. Conway
was the vice chancellor of [University of] Sussex university here in the U.K.,
and it was not until April, which I guess was the end of term or something
like that, that he could actually break free to come to Rockefeller. And
during that period, I think Lincoln persuaded him that I and my program
were a political liability, and I think it was related to the attitude that that
group of anti-AID, anti-supply-side people held.
McFarlane
Did you see it coming?
Sinding
Yeah, I saw it coming, but I thought I might be able to exert independent
influence on Conway. I tried. But in the very first meeting I had with
Conway, he started raising questions about whether in fact the population
problem was over. He was an agricultural ecologist, had made his reputation
on Green Revolution kind of work, and was very interested in the
relationship between population growth and food production and availability
and hunger. And he had become persuaded, I think, quite appropriately, by
the performance of the agricultural sector between 1970 and 2000, that
population growth itself was not a cause of hunger because in fact there had
been all these predictions in the seventies and the late sixties of global
famine and population growth swamping food production systems—real
Malthusianism, the Paddocks, William and Paul Paddock, Famine - 1978
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[Famine - 1975! America’s decision: Who will survive?]. Do you remember that
book? This was a book that came out in the late sixties, about the same time
as [Paul] Ehrlich‟s [The] Population Bomb, which essentially predicted massive
global famine because of population explosion and the inability of
agricultural systems to keep up, totally missing the Green Revolution and the
capacity for technological response to demand. It was really sort of the
classic difference between ecologists and economists. Economists generally
turn out to be right, I have to say. Ecologists sort of see the worst coming
because their models are much more static. Economists have a much greater
faith in the capacity of institutions to adapt and tend, I think, more often, to
be right than wrong about that dimension of things. Anyway, Conway, who
had been convinced, I think, earlier in his career that population growth was
a real challenge to agriculture and agricultural systems and the sustainability
of rural ecology, had been reading the literature that was emerging in the late
nineties and even earlier but was quite prominent at that time and since, that
the population explosion essentially is over, the Wattenberg, Nick Eberstadt
writings that if there ever was a population problem it certainly didn‟t exist
any longer. And fertility was falling rapidly everywhere, and the problem, in
fact, was going to be too few people rather than too many people and too
slow growth, aging of populations and all of that. Conway was really quite
taken with that literature and challenged me to show why there ought to
continue to be an investment by Rockefeller in this area. I actually responded
to that challenge in part by arguing that there were still areas of the world in
which rapid population growth was indeed an important problem, Africa
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and South Asia, which were to be and became the priority geographic foci of
Rockefeller‟s programs under Conway. And secondly, that Rockefeller ought
to start thinking seriously about supporting research on the new demography
on what was going to happen in the countries which had experienced the
most rapid declines in fertility, where the problems that Europe was
beginning to face in terms of population aging and social security systems
and structures to support productivity were going to pale by comparison. I
feel that what‟s coming in China and Taiwan, Korea, Thailand is going to be
catastrophic from the standpoint of economic transformation compared
with the struggles that Europe is having now in figuring out where to find
labor force to support an aging population. And it seemed to me that
Rockefeller had the potential to do some really interesting work in its
population program on sort of the next generation of population issues in
the developing world, especially those countries which were sort of in the
most advanced states of transition. But I got nowhere with that. I think
Conway had made up his mind well before I start making this argument that
he wanted me out, and I got more and more clear and impolite messages
from both him and Lincoln that anything I had to say was not welcome. So,
I decided at Christmastime ‟98, that I would quit before they fired me, and
so that‟s what I did.
McFarlane
That was kind of the first time in your career that—
Sinding
First I‟ve ever—
McFarlane
Yeah.
Sinding
Yeah, and the last time.
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McFarlane
And then you went to Columbia?
Sinding
I went to Columbia, yeah.
McFarlane
Now what did you do at Columbia, and how did you manage that transition?
And then what did you do there?
Sinding
Well, the first thing my wife and I decided we would do is take advantage of
the fact that we had absolutely nothing that compelled us to be in New York
or to show up at work and just take the summer off. So, we took our oneyear-old puppy and our car and we set off for the West and we drove all the
way across the country and all the way back and had a wonderful time, just a
great summer. I left the foundation on the thirtieth of June, which was the
ninth anniversary of my appointment, more or less, within a couple days.
McFarlane
Were they surprised that you left?
Sinding
The foundation?
McFarlane
Um-hm.
Sinding
Were they surprised?
McFarlane
Um-hm.
Sinding
You mean was Conway surprised when I quit?
McFarlane
Um-hm.
Sinding
No. I think—I got a message when I came—that Christmas break our
younger daughter was teaching in India, so our other daughter—our older
daughter and Monica and I went together to India, the three of us, to spend
Christmas with Jenny. And we traveled all through Southern India and so
on, and it was during that trip that I decided that the handwriting was on the
wall. I got back to the office on the second or the fourth of January,
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whatever it was, and there was a message from my secretary that Conway
wanted to see me on Friday in his office, and I figured, This is it. I‟m glad
I‟ve made the decision that the time has come because I‟m going to tell him.
He‟s not going to tell me. I‟m sure that if I had not told him that I had been
thinking it over and decided that I was going to leave that he would have
told me that he had been thinking it over and decided that I should leave
because not only was he not surprised to hear it, but he told me that I would
get a nice severance package. (laughter)
McFarlane
Here it is.
Sinding
Yeah, so I didn‟t say if you quit you‟re not entitled to severance. I just—I
took it, and I got more than a nice severance package. One of the things that
foundations are very, very good about is when they end a relationship with
an employee, particularly one who has been there and been a significant part
of the place for a period of time, they try to make it as painless as possible.
And I got—I made a deal with Rockefeller that if I could raise six hundred
thousand dollars they would give me six hundred thousand dollars that
would support me for the three years at Columbia, for a three-year period at
Columbia. And thanks to the generosity of the Hewlett and the Packard
foundations, I raised—and I guess Gates also—I raised—no, not Gates,
sorry. It was just Hewlett and Packard. My friends Sarah Clark and Joe
Speidel—both of them had been colleagues at AID and whom I had helped
to get into the jobs they were in at the point—both Sarah and—especially
Sarah but also Joe, they returned the favor with grants that I could take back
to Rockefeller and then Rockefeller matched the six hundred commitment
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that they had made. So, I had 1.2 million to support me and an assistant and
money for expenses and so on for the period at Columbia when I did this
future of AID work that I described to you. I had several choices. I could
have gone to Princeton or I could have gone to Harvard or I could have
gone to Pathfinder in Boston or I could go to Columbia. And since my wife
was involved, although not at that point committed to a particular
institution, she was very much involved in a new career in social work in
New York. And because we both enjoyed living in New York and had a nice
country house in Connecticut that we enjoyed going to, the idea of kind of
staying in the city was appealing, even though the idea of working in
Washington Heights in the health sciences campus of Columbia did not
appeal to me after the luxury of midtown Rockefeller Foundation
accommodation, but it all worked out very well. So, what I did is I went to
Columbia, and I got a joint appointment in—no, I had a full appointment as
what they call a clinical professor which means soft money, non-tenured in
the school of public health, but I got a full professorship. I had to go
through the whole academic review process and be confirmed as a full
professor, which meant something to me. It was nice to be a full professor,
and I still have that rank at Columbia. I‟m now a full professor without
salary at Columbia, and if I decide I want to go back there at some point as
long as Allan Rosenfield is the dean—Allan‟s the one who invited me to
come and who very much wanted to make this happen. He was most
generous and gracious in making a place for me at Columbia. If he were still
there and I wanted to go back, I‟m sure Allan would make it happen. So, I
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had the appointment in the [Mailman] School of Public Health, which is
where the money was. The grantee was the School of Public Health. It was
the population center, Pop Fam, [The Harriet and Robert Heilbrunn
Department of] Population and Family Health Center at Columbia. But I
also had an adjunct appointment at SIPA, School of International and Public
Affairs, and over the three years my involvement in SIPA intensified and my
involvement in the School of Public Health actually diminished because I
just loved the teaching at SIPA. I became part of the economic development
program with “Corky” Bryant, Coralie Bryant, at SIPA, and I loved the
students and I loved the teaching. I did a course on re-envisioning foreign
aid, which I taught two or three times, twice I guess, kind of an upper-level
graduate seminar. And I just loved it, and the students loved it. It was a really
good relationship.
McFarlane
Well, this was the project you had for the three years.
Sinding
That‟s right. That was the project.
McFarlane
Can you kind of tell me what that project was about?
Sinding
Yeah. Well, I can give you the book. I‟m delighted to give away copies.
That‟s the—sorry for the dust. (laughs) That‟s the book. From the time I left
AID, I had kind of a bee in my bonnet about what was wrong with the U.S.
foreign aid program, and it had much more to do with the underlying
structure of the program than with the methodology or mechanics. I always
thought that AID was, among the bilateral assistance agencies, maybe among
all assistance agencies, the best on the ground. It was really good in the way
it was able to work with host countries to conceptualize a development
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assistance program in the context of the country‟s needs because it had
professional staff on the ground.
McFarlane
Is that the mission structure, or do you mean something else?
Sinding
It‟s the mission structure, yeah. It is the mission structure, and seemed to me
that the mission structure and the Washington support structure for that
mission structure was a very good way to approach development, real
development cooperation. The problem was that the purposes of foreign aid
were never consistent with the capabilities that had been created for the
administration of AID. The purposes of AID were largely geopolitical, not
developmental, and the perspective was largely short term rather than long
term. And I felt that the potential of the United States to be an effective
agent of development depended upon shifting the focus from the short term
to the long term and creating, basically, a two-track approach to our
economic relationships with developing countries. I felt there was nothing
wrong with the secretary of state having walking around money to secure
short-term political goals but that that ought not to be confused with
development assistance, and the problem was that it always was confused
with development assistance and it always perverted and corrupted the
development strategy and the development program.
McFarlane
And you knew the specifics from being in the field.
Sinding
Right. The fact that Congress required in appropriating funds for economic
support that those funds be programmed as if they were development
assistance funds meant that countries were getting very mixed signals about
U.S. motivations. In Kenya, for example, we had both development
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assistance funds and ESF, economic support funds. I was required as the
mission director to treat them as if they were the same. Even though the
development assistance funds were part of the regular appropriations
process for development, the ESF funds were explicitly payment for the use
of the air facilities and the port of Mombasa. And the Kenyans had a very
different view about their entitlements depending on which of those two
sources of funds one was talking about, and it was really hard as a mission
director to get the Kenyans to agree to program the ESF money for
development programs because they thought it ought to be budget support,
and they were absolutely right in my view.
McFarlane
They‟d earned it.
Sinding
Yeah, there was a quid pro quo. There was a clear quid pro quo. You could
argue there was a quid pro quo in development assistance funding, too, but
it‟s a very different kind of quid that has to do with long-term stability and
security and sort of a better world that‟s a better world for us as well as for
them. But on ESF it was a very clear quid quo pro. We wanted a deep-water
port where we could put an aircraft carrier when we needed one or for shore
leave for the navy, and we needed the airport for refueling of flights that
were going from the States to Diego Garcia which was a major staging area
for everything we had going on in Southeast Asia and the Gulf. And my
view was that if we would be transparent about our motivations and sort of
wall off the development assistance money so that it really could be used for
long-term investments that were not tied to short-term political
considerations, that didn‟t depend on whether a country voted with us or
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didn‟t vote with us in the UN, didn‟t depend on whether a communist
regime came in or a leftist regime that didn‟t like us came in for a four- or
five-year period, that we would invest deeply in the building of institutions,
that that was a sensible way to go, and let the secretary of state have the
other funds to deal with political exigencies. So, that‟s what the book is
basically about, and part of it is about that and the political challenge of
building a constituency for that kind of an enlightened approach, enlightened
self-interest approach. The other part of it is about where the comparative
advantage of bilateral assistance lies vis-à-vis the World Bank and the
multilateral agencies. What I argue is that the U.S. ought to use the
multilateral institutions as the primary mechanism for resource transfers, that
is—I don‟t mean, now, for political transfers. I mean for budgetary support
and for investing in the infrastructure and the high-capital-cost programs of
developing countries: the roads, the infrastructure, the bridges. The Bank is
very good actually at the financing of that kind of development assistance.
What the Bank is lousy at is the social sector work and at capacity building.
The Bank has nothing to draw upon when it comes to financing the building
of institutions or the building of human capacity. It can‟t run training
programs; it can‟t run technical assistance, partly because it doesn‟t have a
body of institutions on which it can draw that are indigenous to the Bank,
and partly because governments are most reluctant to borrow for those
things. They‟ll borrow for things in which you can calculate an economic
rate of return. They won‟t borrow for training and long-term capacity
building, whereas it seemed to me that the U.S. and some other bilateral
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donors but particularly the U.S. had a huge comparative advantage on the
capacity-building side. We have great institutions which have a deep interest
in long-term relationships with counterpart institutions in the developing
world, our universities being one example but only one of several, and that
what the U.S. ought to be doing is using those resources of our own society
to build long-term partnerships that would build capacities, both institutional
and human, in developing countries that are the most seriously neglected of
the resources required for development. The truth is that in all of the history
of development cooperation, going back to the Marshall Plan—I shouldn‟t
say that. The Marshall Plan didn‟t require investments in human and
intuitional capacity building. Those were already in place. What the Marshall
Plan countries needed was capital, but what Kenya needs is the building of
institutions that are capable of planning and directing a coherent
development program over time, and that‟s the kind of thing that has never
been sufficiently financed and can‟t be by the multi-lateral institutions. So,
the core argument of this book is it‟s in the American self-interest to have a
development assistance program that is focused on long-term sustainable
development, and the content of that program ought to basically be capacity
building, using the great institutions of American society to build
partnerships for sustainable capacity building. So, that‟s what I did.
McFarlane
You really had gone off in a different direction.
Sinding
Totally different direction. Well, except I wrote a bunch of articles including
a lot of the best stuff I‟ve done on population, also, while I was there. I
wrote the chapter on family planning in the new Encyclopedia of Population that
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Paul Demeny and Geoff McNicoll have just published. I did an article for
the American Public Health Journal on the great debates in population over the
last three or four decades, what they were, what they produced, and where
we are now. And it was an opportunity to do a lot of thinking about a lot of
things and to actually write. I did three or four articles that were published
during that time. I gave a lot of lectures, so I kept my hand in very much on
population matters, but it was interesting. Once you‟re out of these key
positions, you very quickly get forgotten. It was a real object lesson. You also
discover who your friends are, who your real friends are. And I was no
longer in a position for the first time in my life to give away money, and I
was sitting up in this office at 168th Street, not on 38th and 5th, and not in
State Department and not in the World Bank, and I felt very much sort of
on the margin. I got asked to do things. I published. I stayed active. I was
still on a number of boards. It gave me quite a lot of satisfaction, but I was
really out of the mainstream and felt it.
McFarlane
So, did you finish up this three-year project before you came here?
Sinding
Um-hm. This was published as I was leaving Columbia, and—
McFarlane
Did you know what—this came. This is not something you sought, so did
you know what you were going to do?
Sinding
No, not really. Except that the IPPF discussion started about a year before
my grant and my time at Columbia was coming to an end, I have no doubt
that had IPPF not happened Allan Rosenfield and I would have gotten into
some serious conversations. Well, I know actually what would have
happened. SIPA wanted me to head up the economic development program
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at SIPA, so that was an option. Allan was starting a brand new program in
international health at Columbia that he would have been very interested in.
Actually, he recruited me quite actively to take over Pop Fam. When Jim
McCarthy who had been the director after Allan decided to leave, Allan
really encouraged me to throw my hat in the ring. I just didn‟t want that job,
but something would have materialized at Columbia. I‟d probably be
working with Jeff Sachs on one of the many things he‟s now doing. I‟m quite
sure that I‟d be there and be actively—probably more actively involved in
the sense than I was during the first three years because when I had my own
project and my own money and my own little staff to work with, I was really
self-contained, and people didn‟t seek me out particularly because I was
doing my thing. I was an enclave. But at the end of that period when people
realized that I wasn‟t going to be doing this anymore, they did begin
approaching me, and these various opportunities emerged. So, I would guess
that I would be doing something at Columbia, either between SIPA and the
School of Public Health or in the School of Public Health.
McFarlane
But you‟re here now and you‟re doing sexual and reproductive health.
Sinding
Yeah, right back in the fray.
McFarlane
How broad is sexual and reproductive health here?
Sinding
Well, I can answer the question by telling you what our priorities are at
IPPF. Did we talk about this yesterday?
McFarlane
The A‟s?
Sinding
Yeah, the A‟s. I think that‟s the answer. I‟ve decided that IPPF can‟t be all
things to all people in sexual and reproductive health. We, like any
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institution, have to have a clear focus in areas of emphasis, and—
Tape 4, side 1 ends; side 2 begins.
Sinding
—of what I was thinking about the needs of the field before I came here: in
part, my assessment of the comparative advantage of IPPF vis-à-vis other
institutions and in part the ideas of other people that came into the process
after I arrived. But I think it‟s a pretty good reflection of the strengths and
the limitations of this institution. So, how broad is our definition of
reproductive and sexual health? It‟s broad enough to say we are going to
have a major emphasis on adolescents and dealing with all aspects of their
sexual and reproductive health from education and information to protecting
them against STDs to helping them avoid unsafe abortions to making sure
they have the services that they need to be—
McFarlane
How about female genital mutilation?
Sinding
We don‟t do much on female genital mutilation.
McFarlane
Do you think you will?
Sinding
No, because we can‟t do everything. There are important areas of sexual and
reproductive health that I think we just can‟t take on, either because we
don‟t have a comparative advantage or because we don‟t have the resources.
McFarlane
But safe abortion is at this point in the forefront.
Sinding
Yeah, and that for very strategic reasons. Without deserving it, IPPF was
branded as the enemy by the Republicans in the States, the first institution to
be defunded when Reagan imposed the Mexico City Policy and the first
institution to be defunded when Bush came into office. And it seemed to me
as long as we had been condemned, we might as well be guilty (McFarlane
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chuckles) because the problem of unsafe abortion and the problem of the
legal status of abortion is very real, and the need to address both the right to
abortion and the conditions under which abortion is available seemed to me
to be something that IPPF could and should work on. And it goes back also
to what I was saying yesterday about revitalizing the brave and angry spirit of
what is a volunteer-led institution. Why not use the great natural advantages
of a volunteer structure to become an effective advocacy organization again
on the unfinished business of the reproductive revolution. It seems to me
that effective programs for young people and abortion are the two most
sensitive areas in reproductive health, two certainly of the most important
sensitive areas in reproductive health, and that IPPF ought to be on the
forefront in both of them, also because we‟re in more countries than
anybody else. We‟re in more countries than UNFPA. We‟re active in 180
countries with affiliates in almost 150, so we have a global reach and through
that a global voice that few others have. And that seemed to me to be where
IPPF‟s comparative advantage lay, not in just being another service provider,
and a small-scale one at that, in many countries.
McFarlane
How did IPPF get to be an anathema to the Republicans? Is it their
animosity toward Planned Parenthood Federation of America?
Sinding
I think so. I‟ve never been able to figure out exactly why IPPF was singled
out. I think it was simply that we were Planned Parenthood and the fact that
IPPF was willing to support abortion programs in countries in which it was
legal. The fact that IPPF never was much of an advocate for abortion—
never has been until now—it was always a puzzle to me why the
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Republicans figured that we were so dangerous. But I think it was because
Faye Wattleton was such a thorn in their sides and such a—and PPFA was
such an aggressive proponent of a woman‟s right to choose that we got
tarred with the same brush. I remember in—well, there‟re couple of stories
about this that are worth relating. One is that when I joined the office of
population as director, my second time in the office of population in 1983, I
was shown an article, I think by Sharon Camp, who‟s another person you
absolutely must interview.
McFarlane
Oh, she‟s been interviewed.
Sinding
Oh, she‟s been interviewed. Okay, good. Sharon was at the time a principal
lobbyist at what was still called the Population Crisis Committee at the time.
Sharon, I think, was the one who called my attention to an article that had
been published either just before the election or just after the election by the
Heritage Foundation in their magazine. It was called “Defunding the Left,”
and in that article a lot of institutions across a whole spectrum of sectors
were identified for defunding, from the ACLU to Planned Parenthood. But
the two that were identified (pause in recording)—the two that had been
identified in the population sector were IPPF and UNFPA. So, from the
time the Christian right and the Reagan Administration had signed their pact,
or the Reagan campaign had signed their pact, to the present, Republicans
had been particularly focused on the two of us. They got IPPF with the
Mexico City Policy and they got the UNFPA with the Kemp-Kasten
amendment and the whole China business, and both of those were
techniques that were manufactured by the White House to deliver to the
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right wing constituency what they had promised, which was the defunding of
these two most important of the international institutions in the field. That‟s
one story. The other story is that—well, I‟m blanking. Let‟s the stop the tape
again while I think about (pause in recording)—and then we can—
McFarlane
So, you don‟t feel like you‟re out of the mainstream any longer.
Sinding
No, as we discussed yesterday, I think that fighting the Bush Administration
and trying to fight for a sane and sensible approach to reproductive health
globally is still important work to be done. There are still such powerful
forces of darkness out there, whether it‟s the Vatican or Muslim
fundamentalists or the Reagan—the Bush Administration, that the
fundamental rights of individuals, women in particular, to manage their own
reproductive health is really an important cause still to fight for.
McFarlane
Can you tell me a little bit about the roundtable that you‟ve proposed or are
planning?
Sinding
Yeah, it‟s more than a proposal. It‟s going to happen. It‟s very much along—
it‟s well along in the planning process. Yeah, the summer before I came here,
a group called—I can‟t remember what they called themselves exactly. It‟s
the CEOs of the larger and more prominent of the non-government
organizations in this field based in the U.S. So, it‟s the president of
Pathfinder, the president of Engender Health, the head of Ipas, the head of
Family Care International, the head of Population Action International, the
head of PATH [Program for Appropriate Technology in Health], Population
Reference Bureau, all of the large organizations, some of them USAID
funded, some of them not, that worked in this field that are based in New
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York, Washington for the most part but in the U.S. They get together once
every two, three months just to compare notes and talk about the issues and
what‟s going on. They invited me to meet with them the summer before I
came to London, and at that meeting we were talking about what was going
to happen at Cairo Plus Ten. Was there going to be a conference? And it was
pretty clear already then—this was the summer of 2002—that the
governments were not in any mood to have a conference. Bush was in the
White House. The attitude of the Americans was pretty clear. The
Johannesburg disaster with the environmental conference had already
happened. It was pretty clear that Kofi Annan was not in the mood for a lot
of big UN conferences, and the donors were not inclined to pay for it. So,
the decade of conferences was clearly coming to an end, and so given the
fact that there was little enthusiasm for conferences and the fact that there
was the perception of great danger if there was a population conference
what the U.S. would do, the decision had pretty much been reached that
there would not be an international population conference in 2004. And I
thought that while I understood all of the reasons—many of them very good
ones—not to have such a meeting, that nonetheless some kind of an event
was important. Having lived through Bucharest, Mexico City, and Cairo, I
was aware of how important it was that there be an event, even if there was a
big fight, because it brought attention to the issue, it got governments
engaged, it forced people to think about whether this was still a subject
worth investing in and paying attention to. And in fact, for the most part,
every time there was a fight we got more money. The best thing that ever
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happened to the population field was that the Americans attacked it in
Mexico City and that the Vatican and the Muslims attacked it in Cairo and
made it controversial and forced governments to take a position, and when
they did they almost always came out on the right side of the issue. So, I
thought having an event which profiled Cairo and population was an
important thing to do, and if governments weren‟t going to do it maybe this
would be a thing for IPPF to do. So, I sort of made the case at this meeting.
Adrienne Germain was violently opposed to it.
McFarlane
So, she‟s part of the group.
Sinding
Yeah, she‟s part of the group as the president of the International Women‟s
Health Coalition. I think she opposed it for two reasons. First of all, I think
she—or three: two explicit and one not at all explicit. I think explicitly she
was opposed because she thought that there was a real danger in any kind of
a meeting that it would backfire, that we would lose ground. Secondly, I
think she felt that we ought to be focusing scarce resources on
implementation, not on big talk fests, which is an easy sell. We ought to be
putting the money into programs for women, not into—but I think it‟s
wrong. I think it really is actually important to keep the focus of the
international community on these issues because if you don‟t, people forget
and interest wanes, and we‟ve seen that in this field. The interest in Cairo has
waned year by year by year. The only thing that‟s keeping funding flowing
into it in a substantial way is the Bush Administration, which has got the
Europeans so upset and angry that they feel as if they must continue to
support the cause. But if it weren‟t for the Bush Administration, I think the
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field would be much deader than it is. Anyway, the third reason I think is
that Adrienne just didn‟t like competition. She didn‟t want somebody else
getting a lot of limelight and least of all me. But the European Commission
and in particular the commissioner, Poul Nielson, the commissioner for
development, who was the first guy to step forward and make commitments
to UNFPA and IPPF to fill what he called the decency gap when the U.S.
pulled out, told me a month after I got here—my first meeting outside of
London I went to a conference that had been organized by our European
office in Brussels—told me at that point that he thought that if IPPF would
organize something, the European Commission would be pleased to pay for
it. So, they made a commitment of almost two million Euros way back then.
It wasn‟t a commitment, but it was enough of a commitment to get us going.
And we worked with Family Care International, Jill Sheffield, and Population
Action International, Amy Coen, on basically a three-pronged approach.
We‟re organizing the global Roundtable which will be here in London at the
end of the summer, and PAI and FCI are collaborating on the production of
kind of a global index of progress by countries since Cairo: who‟s doing well,
who‟s not doing well, both among the donors and among developing
countries, and also kind of a thematic magazine of key issues that remain
unresolved, critical, important. It‟ll be kind of a journal that will come out in
conjunction with the Roundtable and with a report card or the index. So,
we‟ve been collaborating on that. We‟ve put together an international
steering committee of about thirty-five networks, international networks of
organizations, and we will be having our fourth meeting of the steering
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committee in the beginning of May. The event will be the thirty-first of
August and the first and second of September at the Queen Elizabeth II
Conference Centre which is just across the square from Parliament, lovely
facility. And we‟re anticipating around seven hundred—between six and
seven hundred participants. That‟s what we have money for. In fact, we
don‟t have quite enough money for that, but we expect that by the time it
happens we‟ll be able to raise it. And it‟s going to have an interesting
organization. It‟s going to be organized around three major plenaries, but the
plenaries are not going to be speeches. They‟re going to be conversations
among global leaders in science and technology, culture, and world events.
And then we‟re going to have afternoon mini plenaries, which pick up on
some of the big themes that are discussed in these morning plenaries and
explore them, and then we‟re going to have ten working groups, which will
be working on different aspects of sexual and reproductive health and rights
and the Cairo agenda and which collectively we are hoping will produce a
program of action. We won‟t call it that, but it will be kind of, In each of
these major areas, what are the great challenges for the next ten years? What
ought we be focusing on in youth, on abortion, and sexual violence, violence
toward women, these themes, and we‟ll see what happens. We‟ve done
pretty well in getting some big names to come, not as well as we had hoped
to get. We had hoped to get Kofi Annan and Hillary Clinton and Bill Gates.
We came close with all three but we didn‟t get them in the final analysis but
we‟ve gotten some pretty big names. And I think it will be a good meeting,
and in any case it will be an opportunity to profile the issue, to keep it on the
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agenda. It‟ll be the same week as the Republican National Convention. We‟re
hoping to turn that from potential liability into an asset by juxtaposing
Bush‟s policies with what we‟re talking about and hoping the press will be
interested in the contrast.
McFarlane
So, this was entirely by design, the—
Sinding
The timing?
McFarlane
Uh-huh.
Sinding
No, it was serendipity or lack thereof depending on whether you think it‟s a
good or a bad thing. We originally scheduled it for the third week of
September. That turned out to coincide with the UNFPA‟s executive board
meeting, and since we really have to have Thoraya Obaid there. (chuckles)
We couldn‟t very well conflict with that. Then we tried moving it back to the
second week of September only to discover that it coincided with Yom
Kippur and Rosh Hashanah, so we couldn‟t do it then although a lot of
people argued that we should, that the UN doesn‟t recognize Jewish
holidays. Why should we? But there was such an outcry from key people that
we decided we had to respect all religions, and I think in fact it was the right
thing to do. So, then we moved it back to the very beginning of September,
and that didn‟t conflict with anything except the Republican convention, and
at that point I said, “We just can‟t change the dates again. We can‟t find any
other time. And why don‟t we turn that into an asset?” We‟re not competing
for the same news hole except maybe in the States, and we might by getting
the right kind of speeches at the plenary and the right kinds of press there be
able to make a story out of this meeting in London that is so antithetical to
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what Bush and the Republicans stand for at the moment that Bush is being
anointed as the candidate for the second term. So, we‟ll see what happens.
The whole thing could blow up, but I think it‟ll be all right.
McFarlane
Is there anything else I should ask you?
Sinding
Yeah, when I was born (laughter) and where. I was born in Orange
Memorial Hospital in Orange, New Jersey—my family lived in Montclair—
in 1943.
McFarlane
And one other thing that we usually start at the beginning, how many
siblings?
Sinding
Yeah, I have a brother who is three years younger and is the editor of The
Princeton Packet.
McFarlane
I want to thank you very much for participating in this project.
Sinding
It‟s been great.
McFarlane
And I don‟t know if you‟d like to conclude by some comments you made
earlier about what a great story this population story is.
Sinding
The population story is? Well, and how blessed I feel to have been a part of
it. Well, one of the things I often say is that alongside the Green Revolution,
the revolution in reproduction is one of the great success of the international
development cooperation of the second half of the twentieth century. I can
think of nothing other than the Green Revolution that is of equivalent
importance to the course of human events as the concerted effort of the
international community to find a way of reducing population growth when
it became evident that high rates of population growth needed to be brought
under control. Demographers were very fond of saying that population
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growth was going to decline either because fertility came down or because
mortality went up, but the rates of increase that were prevailing in the sixties
and seventies simply could not be sustained over any foreseeable period of
time. And the fact that countries found the political will to develop and
implement population politics and that the donor countries came up with
resources to help finance that produced a change in demographic behavior
that I believe very few demographers writing in the 1960s imagined was
possible. When I came into the field in 1971, you couldn‟t find anybody
besides Rei Ravenholt who believed that fertility could fall as fast as it has.
There were perhaps one or two others. Don Bogue was—I‟m thinking now
in the academic community. Don Bogue at Chicago was probably the most
optimistic about the efficacy of programs. But most demographers really did
believe that fundamental structural changes were pre-conditioned for fertility
decline and that that change could not conceivably happen fast enough to
produce major fertility declines in the great majority of countries. Nobody
could have foreseen what happened in China. I think nobody could have
foreseen what happened in South India. India was for years sort of the
poster child for the failure of population policies, and then suddenly one day
people turned around and said, My God! Fertility has fallen from five and
half to three and a half children in this vast country in less than twenty years.
I think that once the East Asian miracle countries showed how effective
population policies could be, it convinced a lot of other countries that this
was an area worth investing in. And once that happened the momentum just
gathered, and I think it‟s unstoppable. I think that we are well on the way
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toward a new equilibrium of population growth with some parts of the
world well below replacement and other parts of the world somewhat above
replacement but with a global average that‟s pretty close to population
stabilization and that what‟s going to happen over the second half of the
twentieth century is massive population redistribution but without much
growth as the high population growth areas export people to the low
population growth areas. And that inevitably is going to carry with it major
dislocations, but I think the population explosion is more or less over. We
will add another two, two and a half, maybe even three billion people to the
planet, and that‟s a very large number but at nothing like the rate that we‟ve
added it over the last half century and at a rate I think that the economies
and the societies of most countries will be able to absorb. What the
consequences for global ecology will be, what it will mean for global
warming, how well physical systems can accommodate this additional three
billion or two billion or somewhere in between—I think it‟s actually going to
wind up being closer to two than to three—is a matter for considerable
speculation, but I think no matter what happens there‟s no gainsaying the
tremendous success and the unexpected rapidity with which fertility has
declined. And I think that the United States deserves the major part of the
credit for that. I think that the leadership on the policy level with all of the
conflicts that it engendered and the commitment of resources which has
survived even the most intense, internal debates about population has just
made a tremendous difference. And I‟m very proud of the fact that for all of
the controversy surrounding it, I was part of the USAID program during the
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twenty years when it made a huge difference in whether this whole
enterprise would succeed or fail. So, yeah, I think that‟s—looking back on
my own career, those are kind of my broad observations about what this
field has been all about and what it‟s meant.
McFarlane
I want to thank you very much.
Sinding
Okay. It‟s been great fun.
End of interview.
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