This paper builds on the Ostroms' oeuvre to suggest that the binary Samuelsonian taxonomy of goods – or the ‘sterile dichotomy’, as Elinor Ostrom calls it – cannot serve as a reliable guide for public policy. Using the Ostroms' insights on co-production, institutional matching, and polycentricity, we argue that the ‘inherent’ nature of goods and their specific taxonomy are not static and definitive concepts but are instead contestable and dynamic features that are institutionally contingent. We explore four crucial mechanisms and/or contexts, not altogether unrelated, whereby the nature of goods becomes contestable and malleable: namely, (1) technological and geographical factors, (2) coproduction and entrepreneurial ingenuity, (3) bundling and unbundling of services, and (4) ideologies and regime shifts. This exercise has twofold purposes. First, we generalize the notion that there is nothing ‘inherent’ in the nature of goods and services and that they are fluid, heterogeneous, and malleable concepts. Second, we contribute to the debate on the provision of public goods and the role of civil society by highlighting the need for institutional malleability and diversity adaptive to changing technology, contexts, and institutional conditions.

Political economists assume that global externalities, such as pandemics and climate change, require global or multi-national solutions. Yet, many aspects of these externalities can be addressed at the micro-level. As Elinor Ostrom pointed out, what scholars perceive as global externalities are in fact nested externalities that are organized in multiple, overlapping scales. By drawing on Ostrom's oeuvre, we explore the notions of nested externalities, polycentricity, and co-production in the context of pandemic governance. We highlight two crucial features of pandemics: first, preventative measures such as social distancing are co-production processes that cannot be provided by governments alone. Second, pandemics, much like climate change, pose nested externalities problems at different levels. Thus, pandemic externalities are better viewed as collective action problems arranged at multiple, nested, and/or overlapping scales. Finally, we propose an alternative institutional take that considers the nestedness of pandemic externalities and the diversity in institutional conditions across jurisdictions.