Governing effectively in a complex world? How metagovernance norms and changing repertoires of knowledge shape international organisation discourses on institutional order in global health

Abstract

This article approaches the field of global health governance from the vantage point of shared discourses and norms on the good governance of governance amongst multiple international organizations (IOs). Conceptually, we introduce metagovernance norms as constitutive, reflexive beliefs concerned with institutional order and IO interactions in a given governance field. We argue that such norms are entangled with causal beliefs and problem perceptions that form part of contingent, contested repertoires of knowledge. Moreover, we illustrate how IO 'expert' groups form an authoritative subject position from which truth claims about governance are advanced. Empirically, we trace metagovernance norms in discourse(s) amongst eight health IOs since the 1970s. We show how metagovernance norms have been The research presented in this article was conducted by members of the Research Group 'Governance for Global Health' which is jointly funded by WZB Berlin Social Science Center and Freie Universit€ at Berlin through the German Research Council's (DFG) Excellence Initiative. An earlier version of the manuscript was presented at the 11 th Pan-European Conference on International Relations The Politics of International Studies in an Age of Crises in Barcelona 2017. The authors wish to thank Lisbeth Zimmermann, Katharina Glaab, Alejandro Esguerra and the other participants in the 4 th European Workshops in International Studies (EWIS) workshop on The Politicisation of Expertise: Contentious Knowledge Politics in International Organizations in Cardiff 2017 for providing helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. We thank our colleagues from the WZB Global Governance unit for their feedback and ideas on the larger research project in which this article's arguments are embedded. We are grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions which helped improve and clarify our article. Finally, we wish to thank Markus Sperl, Marleen Boschen and Martha van Bakel for their editing and research assistance.

Effects of international norms: A typology

“…The distinction between substantive and procedural norms is made along their objects of reference – with the former denoting behavioural provisions that apply to specific policy fields, and the latter denoting rules that structure decision-seeking processes (Hurrell and Macdonald, 2013: 69–70). To account for varying degrees of abstractness, further subtypes of substantive and procedural norms may be added, such as fundamental norms that entail stronger moral claims while being more general and more significant for the normative system as such (Lang et al, 2006: 287; Wiener, 2014: 36), or such as metagovernance norms (Pantzerhielm et al, 2022: 595) that, in contrast to simple rules of procedure, entail more general principles referring to the ‘governance of governance’ (Jessop, 2014; quoted in Pantzerhielm et al, 2022: 595). Furthermore, based on the underlying problem structures and problem characteristics, cooperative and moral norms or liberal and non-liberal norms are distinguished (Goertz and Diehl, 1992; Schneiker, 2021: 108).…”

The State in the Complex Networks of the UN Human Rights Council

“…В 1990-е гг. парадигма глобального управления дополнила взаимозависимость суждением о росте участия негосударственных акторов в мировой политике [Pantzerhielm, Holzscheiter, Bahr, 2019]. В глобальном управлении государство якобы утрачивает исключительные политические функции, которые перераспределяются между другими игроками: международными организациями, транснациональными корпорациями и банками, НПО, общественными движениями [Лебедева, Кузнецов, 2021;Graz, 2019].…”

“…Между тем социологические исследования мировой политики указывают на то, что государство не просто не исключается из социальных сетей НПО и иных организаций, а принимает активное участие в формировании и поддержании деятельности этих сетей [Albert, 2016;Pantzerhielm, Holzscheiter, Bahr, 2019;Seyle, Spivak, 2018]. С точки зрения петербургской научной школы, природа многосторонних структур двойственна: наряду с социальными группами, обеспечивающими функционирование секретариатов, межгосударственное взаимодействие также лежит в основе их деятельности, а потому не может быть выведено за рамки анализа [Кутейников, 2012].…”

Power in relations of international organisations: The productive effects of ‘good’ governance norms in global health

“…The ensuing weakening of coercive hierarchy and centralisation has been connected to an alleged emergence of conflicting 'spheres of authority', to See also Daniel W. Drezner, 'The power and peril of international regime complexity', Perspectives on Politics, 7:1 (2009), pp. [65][66][67][68][69][70]; Eyal Benvenisti and George W. Downs, 'The empire's new clothes: Political economy and the fragmentation of international law ', Stanford Law Review, 60:2 (2007), pp. 595-632.…”

“…The emergence of such novel articulations in our corpus allows us to depict this period as one of normative instability and ambiguity, with continuous support for large-scale privatisation of global health governance on the one hand and, on the other, the growing influence of a discourse marked by a vocabulary of harmonisation, coordination, coherence, and inter-agency collaboration. 68 We thus observe the proliferation of references to harmonisation as a core value in global health governanceharmonisation understood as large-scale initiatives that seek to span all international and transnational actors and networks relevant to a specific issue or cluster of issues. The emergence of harmonisation as a metagovernance norm is, for example, reflected in core policy documents and working papers of the most important IOs in the field of HIV/ AIDS (UNAIDS, World Bank, Global Fund, and WHO), in which they outline their individual or collective perspective on inter-organisational coherence and coordination.…”