Abstract
Despite the existing literature regarding institutional influence on
traditional commons, there is still a comparative dearth of research that theorises
property-rights structure and its impact on contemporary commons. This is
particularly true for public open space (POS) governance: its management and
utilisation and hence its quality, of which underinvestment and overexploitation
leads to increasingly negative externalities and outcomes. An interdisciplinary
study is employed here to depict the relationships of diverse property-rights
structure attributes – POS title existence, community existence, POS title
transfer and POS site handing-over period to local government – with quality of
residential POS. A cross-sectional survey via direct structured observation with
a POS quality audit tool was conducted to collect a randomly stratified sample
of 155 Country Lease (CL) POS and entire 22 Native Title (NT) POS, from the
districts of Kota Kinabalu and Penampang, Sabah, respectively. Archival search
and document analysis on data of property-rights attributes were executed as
well. Next, 2-stage Pearson’s Chi-Square ( c2) and Lambda (λ) with Proportional
Reduction Error feature analyses were performed. Results showed that only these
three property-rights attributes – title deed existence, community existence and
POS site handing-over period to local government- are significantly associated
with POS quality at significance level (p≤0.05). It is found that, although POS
with title deed and community’s involvement might not contribute to good
quality, these attributes were likely to provide better quality. On the other hand,
it is found that the more recent the POS site handing over to government, the
higher the likelihood of good POS quality and vice versa. Such empirical findings
prima facie infer that: (i) current local property-rights structure does matter in
contributing to POS condition, particularly the effective management right which
likely leads to better POS quality; (ii) the present state-property regime in POS
governance is adversarial; and (iii) the importance of an interim privatisation and
communal regimes leads to a better POS. Thus, these may provide policy insights
by encouraging public officials to consider reengineering the POS market via an
adaptive property-rights re-alignment paradigm in the interest of addressing POS
quality and sustainability issues, which warrant further research