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Health Policy and Planning Advance Access originally published online on July 24, 2008
Health Policy and Planning 2008 23(5):339-350; doi:10.1093/heapol/czn020
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Published by Oxford University Press in association with The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine © The Author 2008; all rights reserved.
The online version of this article has been published under an open access model. Users are entitled to use, reproduce, disseminate, or display the open access version of this article for non-commercial purposes provided that: the original authorship is properly and fully attributed; the Journal and Oxford University Press are attributed as the original place of publication with the correct citation details given; if an article is subsequently reproduced or disseminated not in its entirety but only in part or as a derivative work this must be clearly indicated. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

This article appears in the following Health Policy and Planning issue: Future directions for health policy analysis: a tribute to the work of Professor Gill Walt [View the issue table of contents]

Changing fortunes: analysis of fluctuating policy space for family planning in Kenya

Joanna Crichton*

*African Population and Health Research Center, PO Box 10787, 00100-GPO, Nairobi, Kenya. Tel: +254 20 272 0400/1/2. Fax: +254 20 272 0380. E-mail: jcrichton{at}aphrc.org

Policies relating to contraceptive services (population, family planning and reproductive health policies) often receive weak or fluctuating levels of commitment from national policy elites in Southern countries, leading to slow policy evolution and undermining implementation. This is true of Kenya, despite the government's early progress in committing to population and reproductive health policies, and its success in implementing them during the 1980s. This key informant study on family planning policy in Kenya found that policy space contracted, and then began to expand, because of shifts in contextual factors, and because of the actions of different actors. Policy space contracted during the mid-1990s in the context of weakening prioritization of reproductive health in national and international policy agendas, undermining access to contraceptive services and contributing to the stalling of the country's fertility rates. However, during the mid-2000s, champions of family planning within the Kenyan Government bureaucracy played an important role in expanding the policy space through both public and hidden advocacy activities. The case study demonstrates that policy space analysis can provide useful insights into the dynamics of routine policy and programme evolution and the challenge of sustaining support for issues even after they have reached the policy agenda.

Key Words: Policy analysis, family planning, health policy, contraception

Accepted for publication 22 June 2008.


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