Abstract

Social scientists often assume that complex externalities, such as pandemics, should be governed through a Pigouvian approach that deems top-down coercion and restrictions sufficient to govern externalities. Yet, the production of public health requires citizens to actively adopt precautionary and cooperative measures. Moreover, as Elinor Ostrom’s work on global warming suggests, externalities can be governed through polycentric approaches that match the scale and nestedness of the externality with appropriate governance structures from the bottom-up. Drawing on Vincent and Elinor Ostrom’s work, this paper explores the notions of nestedness, polycentricity and coproduction to shed light on the nature of modern public health challenges. It provides a framework for understanding global challenges by pointing out two crucial, yet neglected, features of complex externalities: first, social distancing and other public health measures are coproduction processes. Second, responding to health externalities is a problem of governing nested externalities at different scales. This provides a suitable conceptual foundation for responding to future global challenges.

摘要

社会科学家经常假设复杂的外部性，例如流行病，应该通过一种认为自上而下的强制和限制足以控制外部性的庇古方法来管理。然而，公共卫生的产生需要公民积极采取预防和合作措施。此外，正如埃莉诺·奥斯特罗姆（Elinor Ostrom）关于全球变暖的工作所表明的那样，可以通过多中心方法来管理外部性，这些方法将外部性的规模和嵌套性与自下而上的适当治理结构相匹配。本文借鉴文森特和埃莉诺·奥斯特罗姆的工作，探讨了嵌套性、多中心性和共同生产的概念，以阐明现代公共卫生挑战的本质。它通过指出两个至关重要但被忽视的问题，为理解全球挑战提供了一个框架：复杂外部性的特征：首先，社会疏远和其他公共卫生措施是共同生产的过程。其次，应对健康外部性是一个不同尺度的嵌套外部性治理问题。这为应对未来的全球挑战提供了合适的概念基础。