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In this paper, we discuss the unsettled politics of child and youth representation in international institutions. By introducing the collection of papers that constitute this Special Issue, we examine how international institutions empower children and youth through participation and recognition, but also how institutionalized rules, routines, and policy discourses constrain the realms of possibility available to them. While the contributions illustrate how the politics of age and generation underpin IR as subject matter, they also prompt us to think of child and youth representation as unsettled and multifarious. We identify three ‘troubles of representation’ that complicate the involvement of children and youth in global policymaking: (i) the problem of speaking for others; (ii) representative hierarchies and barriers; and (iii) young people’s liminal position in-between worlds. Finally, we discuss how young people’s in-betweenness offers a productive prism that invites us to revisit the politics of representation and identify avenues for future research.

How is international order constructed and maintained, disrupted, and struggled about? In this article, I throw new light on these perennial questions of IR scholarship by turning attention to how expert knowledge and the objects it brings forth invite different ways of ordering. Theoretically, I develop a relational ontology of objects through a rereading of Foucauldian archeology and work in political ontology. My empirical story examines two objects of expertise that relate the more encompassing and elusive governance objects “human rights” and “development” in sharply contrasting ways. Born out of postcolonial legal discourse at the United Nations and the political project of “Third World” solidarity, the notion of a human right to development posits development as a human right and makes sense of its realization within an anti-colonial imaginary that politicizes international institutions and interstate relations. In contrast, the “human rights-based approach” that has lately been embraced as a normative methodology by United Nations development agencies evokes a hierarchical vision that privileges norms and knowledge that are seen as international, global, or universal, while seeking to improve and remold actors and practices in developing countries in their image. Despite their seemingly technical nature and international organizations’ well-documented tendency to downplay their value judgments, objects of expertise are thus entangled in and co-constitute different, potentially conflicting visions of international order.

In this paper, regime complexes are conceptualized as dynamic networks constituted by relations between international organizations (IOs). We introduce "IO positioning" as a conceptual lens for studying patterns and shifts in IO networks resulting from negotiations between IOs over their distinctiveness and social membership in complex organizational fields. We suggest that IO positioning has two constitutive effects. First, on the level of individual IOs, positioning affects IO identities within the field as these are (re)negotiated in relations with other organizations. Secondly, the positioning practices of IOs have constitutive effects on the contours of entire policy fields too; they form and shift the boundaries of regime complexes. Empirically, the paper examines the utility of our approach by analyzing the history, dynamics, and positioning effects of interorganizational relations between eight IOs in global health governance-an area of international cooperation that is commonly portrayed as exceptionally fragmented, complex, and densely populated. Examining relations between our eight IOs, we provide network analytical longitudinal data of in- and out-reporting by IOs derived from IOs' annual reports between 1970 and 2017. We triangulate our network analysis with data derived from semi-structured interviews with health IO professionals.

Contemporary international organizations (IOs) are routinely portrayed as being more accessible to a wide variety of actors than ever before. The recent hyper-institutionalization of youth in international politics testifies to this pluralization, at least quantitatively. This paper traces the historical emergence of youth as an object of concern among health IOs. Covering a period of over 50 years, we analyse semantic fields surrounding youth and find that young people have primarily been portrayed as society’s future capital in development discourses or as a risk-prone group in the context of HIV/AIDS and reproductive health. Only since the beginning of the 21st century can we trace portrayals of youth that emphasize rights, inclusion and engagement in global health. Our study addresses an empirical research gap on youth in global health and prompts us to critically re-evaluate the optimistic liberal assessments that have marked International Relations (IR) theories on the ‘opening-up’ of IOs.

How are children and young people made sense of and acted upon in the politics of global health? How do children and young people interpret, resist and engage with the discourses, policies and sites populated by established, institutionalized global health actors? This contribution takes stock and critically interrogates the state of research on childhood and youth in the politics of global health. It contrasts the dearth of academic engagement with the place of young people in global (health) governance with the manifold forms of institutionalized participation that has proliferated in international institutions in recent years. We perform a systematic review of global health scholarship across pertinent academic outlets, epistemological and disciplinary divides and find that the political agency and representation of children and youth in global health politics has not been systematically, or comprehensively researched. Thereafter, we map youth representation in global health empirically, pointing to its varied institutionalized forms and the involvement of both public and private, adult and youth-led organizations. Our chapter highlights the contestation surrounding both the notions of ‘child’ and ‘youth’ and the indeterminate boundaries between these two identities. We also show that despite strong normative commitments to making children and youth heard, the emerging institutional ecology surrounding young people’s engagement in global health is marked by a strong presence of youth while children are largely at the margins. At the same time, even youth representation in global health is characterized by homogenous depoliticized discourses that often do not perceive of young people as competent political actors in the present. The concluding section of our chapter proposes new avenues for research into the political representation of children and young people in this global policy field. 

At the United Nations (UN), the early years of the post-Cold War era were marked by a historically novel sense of urgency to render governing practices in development cooperation and humanitarian affairs more ‘human’, ‘people-’ and ‘rights’-centred. Since then, the UN ‘Human Rights-Based Approach’ (HRBA) has become widely accepted as an authoritative methodology for grasping the practical implications of rights language. This paper examines the politics of the HRBA by exploring how it ‘fixes’ the multifaceted, normatively charged and elusive object of ‘human rights’ and renders it actionable for UN agencies. It contributes to recent theorizing on knowledge in IR and ties in with critical human rights scholarship by developing a post-foundational reading of human rights and the HRBA that frontloads constitutive power and politicizes ontology. Through an in-depth reconstruction of UN knowledge production on the HRBA, I find that it excludes concerns with international power relations and depoliticizes inequality through a narrow focus on lacking subject capacities. Moreover, I illustrate that the HRBA operates according to dichotomous spatial metaphors and implicit hierarchies that locate UN agencies ‘above’ the subjects and settings they interact with, both normatively and epistemically. The paper contributes to the critical study of human rights by excavating the ambiguous power effects at work in rights-based UN methodologies. Objets multiples et solutions ontiques : les droits de l’homme et les politiques « oubliées » de l’approche fondée sur les droits de l’homme des Nation unies. 

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 organisations (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 constructed around competing beliefs about governance ‘effectiveness’ and problem perceptions concerned with different forms of ‘complexity’. Our research demonstrates that discourses on institutional order in global health are shaped by metagovernance norms drawing on historically-specific knowledge repertoires.

How do regime complexes as social orders affect relations among international organizations (IOs)? This article explores this question by studying the longitudinal development of interorganizational practices and the social meanings attached to these practices that constitute a regime complex. Adopting a practice lens, our analysis redirects scholarly attention from rationalist accounts of strategic interactions between IOs to the study of patterned "doings"among actors in regime complexes. The mixed-methods analysis of interorganizational practices between eight IOs in the global health regime complex shows that cooperation among IOs is not primarily the outcome of rational responses to problems of collective action. Rather, IOs engage in similar types of practices because they want to be considered "good"IOs that follow a repertoire of habitual and appropriate practices. In turn, interorganizational practices create social meanings that constrain IOs. The approach put forward in this paper demonstrates the ordering effect of practices on the global health regime complex. 

In recent years, scholarship on international organisations (IO) has devoted increasing attention to the relations in which IOs are embedded. In this article, we argue that the rationalist-institutionalist core of this scholarship has been marked by agentic, repressive understandings of power and we propose an alternative approach to power as productive in and of relations among IOs. To study productive power in IO relations, we develop a theoretical framework centred on the concept of 'metagovernance norms' as perceptions about the proper 'governance of governance' that are shared among IOs in a governance field. Drawing on discourse theory, we contend that metagovernance norms unfold productive power effects, as dominant notions of how to govern well and effectively (i) fix meanings, excluding alternative understandings and (ii) are inscribed into practices and institutions, hence reshaping inter-organisational relations over time. To illustrate our framework, we trace metagovernance norms in discourses among health IOs since the 1990s. We find a historical transformation from beliefs in the virtues of partnerships, pluralisation, and innovation, towards discursive articulations that emphasise harmonisation, order, and alignment. Moreover, we expose the productive power of metagovernance norms by showing how they were enacted through practices and institutions in the global health field.