Abstract
There are severe issues of public open space (POS) underinvestment and overexploitation. However, few studies have been conducted on the property rights structure and its impacts on rural commons governance, specifically concerning local neighbourhood residential POS quality and sustainability. The social-ecological system framework and the new institutional economics theory were employed to examine the local diverse property rights system and its effects on the emergence of POS dilemmas. Rural commons covering neighbourhood residential Country Lease (CL) and Native Title (NT) POS from the districts of Kota Kinabalu and Penampang, Sabah Malaysia were selected. A mixed-method phenomenological case study, involving multi-stakeholders’ perspectives across public-private-user sectors, was employed. This study revealed four main interconnected property rights issues, including attenuated rights, incomplete rights, maladaptive rights, and security-based de facto perceptive rights, under the complex state-private regime, which incentivise the opportunistic behaviour of individuals in externalising POS commons dilemmas. The findings further inferred that the local diverse property rights issues and POS dilemmas caused, and are associated with, other rights issues and dilemmas, forming a rights-dilemmas nexus. Not only do the institutional failures actuate POS dilemmas, but the former also engender other forms of property rights failures, while the latter cause other POS dilemmas. This paper suggests policy and management insights to public officials, in which the importance of the institutional-social-POS behavioural factor and the re-engineering of POS governance via adaptive property rights realignment are emphasised.
Highlights
Local governments provide various local public goods which are essential to serve as a public purpose, and one of them is public open spaces (POS) for both urban and rural neighbourhood contexts
Providing effective POS governance to protect and sustain its quality poses a major challenge in rural management
One lesson learnt is that the application of the social-ecological system (SES) framework and the new institutional economics (NIE) theory is relevant and pivotal for explaining today’s recurring rural neighbourhood residential POS consumption and management, quality, and sustainability issues
Summary
Local governments provide various local public goods (services and facilities) which are essential to serve as a public purpose, and one of them is public open spaces (POS) for both urban and rural neighbourhood contexts. Since POS provides numerous ecosystem services and values including economic, ecological and social benefits, adequate protection and efficient management are necessary. Economies 2019, 7, 61 thereby causing POS negative externalities (Foster and Iaione 2016; Sangmoo 2015). These POS issues and negative externalities are discovered in the local rural residential neighbourhood context, in Sabah, Malaysia (Ling et al 2016; Ling and Leng 2018). As the above problems and social costs of Tieboutian-modelled (government-managed) POS (Tiebout 1956) that occur are associated with governance, social consumption and management, rather than the initial and temporal phase of spatial planning and architectural design-based issues , a multidisciplinary approach that involves an institutional-social-ecological lens is required (Ling et al 2019; Ling 2019a).
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