Institutional property rights of residential public open space in Sabah, Malaysia

There is still a lack of research on social-ecological system, especially implications of property-rights structure and transaction costs on neighbourhood commons. This is true for residential public open space (POS) governance, particularly regarding its ownership regime, consumption and management rights. Thus, a new institutional economic paradigm is employed in this research to address the four objectives as follows; (i) to study the relationships of diverse property-rights structure attributes with quality of residential POS; (ii) to examine the POS commons dilemmas that resulted by the local diverse property-rights structure issues; (iii) to develop a common-property self-organising system in order to address the issues of local property-rights structure and dilemmas of POS; and (iv) to formulate and validate a social-ecological system model. A mixed-method design, mainly a phenomenological case study approach, was adopted. Based on the two districts of Kota Kinabalu and Penampang, Sabah, various main sampling methods, data collection and data analysis techniques were performed on the respective units of analysis. These mainly involved issues of Sabah’s POS property-rights, social dilemmas of POS quality, 172 POS sites, 12 public officials, 8 private suppliers, 200 residents and 5 experts. Results showed that three property-rights attributes: title deed existence, community involvement and POS site handing-over period to local government have statistically significant associations with POS quality, at X2 (1, N = 172) = 22.984, p = 0.000; X2 (1, N = 150) = 7.938, p = 0.005; and X2 (2, N = 150) = 30.047, p = 0.000, respectively. The present local property-rights structure is adversarial as opportunistic stakeholders’ behaviour and commons dilemmas were externalised. Lastly, the self-governing with polycentric system and a conceptual theory-based social-ecological system model are necessary and valid to address the status quo of property-rights and POS dilemmas. The model also renders a better understanding of social-ecological system interrelationships. Aside from leading to policy assessment and design that must be transdisciplinary in structure which aims at curbing POS quality issues, the model provides policy and management insights, by encouraging public officials to consider reengineering the POS ownership, consumption, management and maintenance system, via the adaptive property-rights re-allocation