Do institutions matter in neighbourhood commons governance? A two-stage relationship between diverse property-rights structure and residential public open space (POS) quality: Kota Kinabalu and Penampang, Sabah, Malaysia

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 (χ2) 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.