Second, Vincent Ostrom was reluctant to embrace the analytical homogenization
strategies very popular in what has become mainstream Public Choice. For instance, he
was ‘‘critical of the utilitarian approach to defining social welfare functions, in which
individual utility levels were supposedly aggregated to represent the goals of some collective
group’’ and especially their use as ‘‘the standard against which actual processes
typically are compared’’ (McGinnis and Ostrom 2012, p. 19). Similarly, he had serious
reservations regarding the excessive and leveling use of efficiency in public policy. One of
the benefits of polycentric systems of governance advocated by Vincent Ostrom, explain
McGinnis and Ostrom, is their capacity to capture economies of scale. Yet, Vincent
Ostrom never assumed that this is or should be the only goal under consideration. It may be
the case that ‘‘in a polycentric order, individuals or communities might decide, for
whatever reason, to sacrifice efficiency for the pursuit of other goals, such as accountability,
fairness, or physical sustainability’’ (McGinnis and Ostrom 2012, p. 20).