This paper proposes a theoretical account of institutional transformation and the emergence of order in global interorganisational relations, which is centred on the concept of "metagovernance". It does so by theorising on the advent of governance architectures in global health governance-relationships between international organisations (IOs) in this field that are stable over time. Global health governance is routinely portrayed as an exceptionally fragmented field of international cooperation with a perceived lack of synergy and choreography between international and transnational organisations. However, our paper starts from the observation that there are also movements of convergence between IOs. We seek to explain these by looking at the effects of international norms that define good global governance as orderly and harmonised global governance. We conceptualize such norms as "metagovernance norms" that are enacted in reflexive practices which govern and order the relationships between IOs. Empirically, this paper traces changing interactions and institutional arrangements between IOs (World Health Organization; World Bank; Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria) in global health governance since the late 1940s and shows how patterns therein reflect and (re)produce broader discursive perceptions of what "health" is about and how the governance thereof ought to be organised.

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.

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.