International Journal of the Commons Vol. 10, no 1 xxxx 2016, pp. x–x Publisher: Uopen Journals URL:http://www.thecommonsjournal.org DOI: 10.18352/ijc.618 Copyright: content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License ISSN: 1875-0281 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 Ling Gabriel Hoh Teck Faculty of Built Environment, Urban and Regional Planning Department, Universiti teknologi Malaysia, Malaysia [email protected] Ho Chin Siong Faculty of Built Environment, Urban and Regional Planning Department, Universiti teknologi Malaysia, Malaysia [email protected] Ali Hishamuddin Mohd Faculty of Geoinformation and Real Estate, Department of Real Estate, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Malaysia [email protected] Tu Fan Land and Housing Research Institute, College of Economics and Management, Zhejiang University of Technology, China [email protected] 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 2 Ling Gabriel Hoh Teck et al. 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. Keywords: Governance, institutions, neighbourhood residential commons, property-rights structure, public open space (POS), quality, two-stage associations Acknowledgement: The authors would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality of the paper. 1. Introduction There have been many studies relating to preservation of public open space (POS) that were undertaken, such as the effect of perception and socioeconomic standing of stakeholders towards POS protection, spatial POS design planning model, and ‘conventional’ planning policies. However, the perennial issues of POS governance, especially with regards to rampant overexploitation and mismanagement, are still growing that consequently result in POS externalities and market failures (Colding et al. 2013; Ling et al. 2014a). How can this status quo be explained? The current void was the impetus that led to a multi-disciplinary approach to serve as a lynchpin to address this issue. Do institutions matter in neighbourhood commons governance? 3 Figure 1: Map of Kota Kinabalu and Penampang districts, Sabah, Malaysia. The case study regions are highlighted in red. (Source: Authors’ work). In this paper, the study areas focus on the districts of Kota Kinabalu and Penampang in Sabah, Malaysia (Figure 1) that emphasised neighbourhood (solely on landed-property and exclusive of the gated communities) residential POS, are also cogently associated with the aforementioned human-ecological conundrum (Ahmad et al. 2013; Ling et al. 2014a). Hence, we primarily employed the ground-breaking ‘Coase-inspired’ property-rights and transaction costs analytic framework1, (Slaev 2014). This is supplemented with the theories of common pool resources (CPRs), social (commons) dilemmas, contracts, opportunism, etc. (see Cole and Ostrom 2012 call for advanced and realistic property theories) as a heuristic paradigm to shed new insights, especially in the local residential commons POS context (Rabinowitz 2012), with the focus on analysing the effects of institutions on the social-ecological interaction as well as its outcome (quality). Such institutional dimensions that generally influence social-environmental interaction, in comparison with traditional commons (e.g. natural resources like irrigation, ocean, forestry and fisheries) is, however, mostly under-researched 1 Diversifying the ‘mainstream’ environmental planning: “planning with property-rights” (Webster 2007; see also, Boydell et al. 2007) call for the mix of property-rights, economic and planning theo- ries. Also, this is vital by transcending such premise application in addressing the public policy issues (see Musole 2009). 4 Ling Gabriel Hoh Teck et al. or paid little attention to. This is notably so in the contemporary residential neighbourhood POS management or governance2 (see, Hess 2012; Mincey et al. 2013; Andersson et al. 2014; Boydell and Searle 2014). Note that we do not claim there are no prior studies at all or extreme deficiency of researches of institutional factor conducted in such new commons (see Dolšak and Ostrom 2003a). However, reviewing the number of new and conventional commons studies in the institutional purview, we can assert is that, the former still postulates more attention and studies. This is affirmed by Colding et al. (2013) as well that according to Digital Library of the Commons in 2011, only 1.4% of studies deal with the topic of institutional property system in such contemporary settings. Hence, the above justification imperatively drives us to employ non- experimental methods3 to describe the two-stage association between Sabah’s ‘diverse’ institutional arrangements: (1) Institution-based property-rights structure4 (see Table 1), and (2) POS quality. The aims are to address the following key research questions: (i) whether the current diverse institutional property- rights structure relates to the quality5of residential POS (is there any significant correlation)?, and (ii) If there is a correlation, what is the pattern/direction of correlation?, and (iii) to what extent or how influential are institution impacts on the POS quality (what is the strength of correlation)? Such study is significant as it not only contributes to the pool of knowledge, but practical implication is also provided, including insights gained whereby policy-makers may understand better, from an institutional position, the status quo of state-owned POS governance. Thus, policy-makers can start seeking to address the POS management issues by adaptively re-aligning property-rights structure (see more in conclusion and recommendations section below). The main purpose of Figure 1 above is to display the general Sabah state’s background features, the two districts’ spatial features e.g. size, geographical location, neighbouring natures, area as well as their respective demographic, socioeconomics, and administration of local government (jurisdiction of 2 There have been many property-rights studies carried out; in fact, its literature is well-established, particularly in traditional commons. Still, more studies that focus on new commons study, especially in developing countries, are required. This indicates that there is a gap or paucity in institutions in third world nations (see, Meinzen-Dick 2014), particularly in this study that was carried out in Malaysia. 3 Due to methodological limitations in demarcating, assessing and mapping the quality of POS (Hillsdon et al. 2006); however, many works were experimentally compared to field-based empiri- cal approaches; e.g. survey/observational study design. Both methods may result differently, but the latter is more preferable as the former may not be suitable as it may lack some sense of ‘reality’ or ‘realness’ in analysing the effects of social behaviour of stakeholders in CPR utilisation and manage- ment (see Liechti and Binder 2014). 4 There is a need for conceptualisation of analysis of property-rights mosaic, especially the existence of rights