Institutional Complexity as a Metanarrative in Global (Health) Governance

The default perspective on international politics is one that equates the numerical increase in actors, rules and institutions relevant to IR with a historically unprecedented complexity of the social structures surrounding issues and actors. As a consequence – in contemporary scholarship on “governance complexes”, “regime complexes” and institutional fragmentation – a core underlying assumption is that policy problems, knowledge about these problems and the structures and actors through which policy problems are governed are indefinitely more complex than they were before. Complexity, we argue in this paper, is a powerful component of the contemporary academic and practitioner discourse on governance and the global political order. Approaching this topic from a critical constructivist standpoint, we contend that truth claims related to the complexity of governance in the 21st century underlie dominant normative thinking of what constitutes good global governance and appropriate social and political organization. The diagnosis of complexity, we argue, does not merely serve descriptive purposes in order to capture the nature of global governance in the 21st century. Rather, it is a powerful metanarrative whose productive effects reach out to the justification of the action/inaction of international organizations and transnational non-state actors; limiting the range of responses and strategies with which to respond to international issues; offering possibilities for actors to sidetrack or defer responsibilities; and legitimizing the involvement and authority of private actors, experts and consultants in the activities of international organizations. While we conceive of complexity as a metanarrative in which the discourse and practices of international organizations in the 21st century are embedded and made sense of (structure), this metanarrative can be exploited by actors in a variety of ways (agency). Thus, rather than merely showing that complexity constitutes a powerful signifier in international politics, our paper carves out a theoretical framework and methodology to expose the “structure of presuppositions and assumptions that enables it to make sense as a ‘policy narrative’” (Walters 2004). To illustrate the usefulness of this theoretical perspective and to address more specific ways in which the complexity narrative becomes productive, we propose to analyze its various enactments. To this end, our paper discusses empirical findings from an analysis of the IO discourse in the field of global health. In scholarly literature and practitioner discussions alike, global health governance is routinely portrayed as a particularly complex governance field. It therefore constitutes a suitable case for studying how the complexity narrative operates empirically. The results build on a comprehensive corpus of annual reports of eight health IOs (GAVI, Global Fund, UNAIDS, UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF, WHO, World Bank) from 1970 to 2013. Specifically, they evidence how complexity functions as a source of legitimacy for IOs, and at the same time is also used as a means to adjust expectations and by-pass responsibility. Furthermore, we find that complexity narratives function as a discursive strategy for depoliticization and the empowering of experts. Finally, we show that more specific notions about what “complexity” entails vary historically and are intimately connected to changing causal beliefs about governance effectiveness.