In response to a question on Yahoo! Answers, I've decided on some basic, first blush concepts to handle human overpopulation. Obviously, there is a lot of cultural inertia and baggage to overcome before any of these could even remotely be feasible.
1) Dump the nuclear family ideal and force matrilinial, matrilocal extended families.
The nuclear family ideal pushed two things: spacial expansion and population expansion. Additionally, an extended family with extensive familial support reduces familial competition and increases competition for women as mates providing a more stable society.
2) Continue with (nuclear) Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) policies.
Fear of nuclear annihilation does one main thing: Keeps people talking. The threat of combat actually promotes more peaceful solutions.
3) Decrease the child mortality rate everywhere.
People do not stop having kids because some die, they have MORE kids to avoid it and invest less in each until they get to be adults. which leads into...
4) Coerce social systems where resource acquisition is competitive but only accessible by individuals or very small groups.
Essentially, create social systems where the payoff for parents/families is to invest heavily (and successfully) into fewer children who are more likely to live (as in #3), add to the existing family (as in #1) and will not overwhelm the family's living situation. Because you got rid of nuclear families, these fewer kids--ideally a zero-sum growth over time--will be more focused on efficiency rather than expansion...
5) Create social norms based on efficiency and locally supportable living systems.
Simply, create economies where 90% of what's needed to live is made and or grown locally with less import/export. This forces localities to avoid "dumping their problems elsewhere" because they gain dependence on local environments. Where the 10% comes in are locale-unique goods needed elsewhere which should still foster economic interdependence and avoid warfare.
Additionally, you reduce the need for expansionism.
6) Foster open-border, merit based immigration with a requirement for local acculturation.
Allow mobility on the individual level. Let family members have families in other states, regions, etc. Again, this reduces violence, especially organized violence, but also helps mediate mismatches between environments.
7) Protect local institutions.
Institutions are generally solutions to specific problems. Because many of these problems are people, culture, and location specific, expecting a one-size-fits-all solution (or panacea) often creates more problems or more complexity than necessary. By allowing people to freely "vote with their feet" (as in #6) and requiring local-focus economies, you can protect somewhat against local tyranny, but...
8) Restrict "national" governments to the minimum.
National governments wouldn't tell lower levels what to do. Their function would be restricted to protecting the economic process, protecting the people involved, and facilitating inter-regional activities. The main effect would be essentially like that of motor oil: lubrication and washing clusters of potentially harmful clumps of whatever out of the way.
Basically, the point is to allow the local level governments to survive and communicate.
9) Control crime in a zero-sum or "for profit" manner.
This is just a soapbox point, but make two distinctions about criminals: 1) Do you (ever) want them back in your society again? 2) What is their utility? If the answer to #1 is yes, you put them in an organized setting where they must comply by the rulessupervisionrvirion for long enough to ensure they aren't likely to offend again. If the answer to #1 is no and they have any utseparateeperate them from everyone else and put them to use. Otherwise, put them out of our misery.
However, given the effects of the other tenets, I would expect a drop in crime...
10) Maximize the ability to live "off the grid" or in small groups while maintaining access to information and communication on a world-wide scale.
This ties into many of the others. It's a major tenet though because it ties the high-risk/costly investments closer to home where people have more influence on their own lives while allowing lower-risk and low-cost access to a greater range of potential solutions to problems. Functionally, it's intended to optimize the process for creating solutions effectively.
Essentially the idea is to maximize the problem-solving ability of small, semi-independent, local populations with solutions to local problems living in areas long term responsibly while reducing the need or benefit of large scale competition between societies. By forcing people to find ways to survive and succeed locally with little threat of outside forces wiping them out, you decrease the benefits of maintaining high numbers of humans. Additionally, if you put a premium on the survival of natural or semi-natural ecologies you can protect them directly while reducing the effects of high human population.
I totally don't know what anyone else's Utopia looks like or even if it's possible, but I figure given enough time and support, people might be able to figure it out on their own for themselves.
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