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. Although there has been a plethora of studies related to the preservation of public open space (POS), the perennial problems of state-owned POS concerning space over-exploitation, underinvestment and underutilisation, and mismanagement, including vandalism, inaccessible and unsafe spaces, and illegal land conversion to other purposes are still prevalent, especially in developing countries, thereby causing POS negative externalities (Foster and Iaione 2016; Sangmoo 2015).

These POS issues and negative externalities are also discovered in the local rural residential neighbourhood context, specifically in Sabah, Malaysia (Ling et al. 2016; Ling and Leng 2018). As the above problems and social costs of Tieboutian-modelled (government-managed) POS 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[1], a multidisciplinary approach that (Ling et al. 2019; Ling 2019a).

Mainly, the social-ecological system (SES) by Ostrom (1990) and new institutional economics (NIE) by Coase (1960) and Williamson (1975) are adopted as analytical frameworks to shed light on the local residential neighbourhood commons POS planning context, to investigate the effects of institutions on the social-ecological behavioural interaction and its quality outcomes (Lai et al. 2015). These theoretical underpinnings by the three Nobel laureates above were selected because they have proven to be relevant, robust, and influential in investigating and understanding a wide range of political-economic issues, mainly dealing with the effects of institutions and property rights on common resources (e.g., POS) governance (management and consumption) and allocation that consequently determine resource quality and sustainability.

Based on the literature review, there is growing concern that an institutional factor will have fundamental impacts on ecological and economic resources distribution, and its sustainability outcome. However, our understanding of such institutional design, encompassing the components of the institutional environment (e.g., institutions) and institutional arrangements (e.g., property rights) in common resources remains limited. Although the literature of property rights systems on the social and economic performance (Webster et al. 2016), natural traditional commons (e.g., pastures and agriculture) (see Lu and Xie 2018), and common pool resources (CPRs) is copious, and is rapidly emerging in urban commons (Foster and Iaione 2016), such microeconomics institutional dimensions on rural neighbourhood commons, however, receive little attention from scholars and practitioners. The effects of the property rights system and transaction costs alignment, particularly in relation to the theories of opportunism and social (commons) dilemmas have been under-researched, and are less empirically explored, in the rural neighbourhood POS management and governance context of developing countries. Despite the ample pieces of evidence from the above property rights studies on various social-economic-commons settings, their findings may not always be reflective, nor can they be directly extrapolated to other commons contexts. Thus, rural commons, particularly in developing countries, are worth studying on the case-by-case basis because they are often associated with a diverse, weak institutional design, and unique, complex SES characteristics (Ling and Leng 2018).

Moreover, most of the property rights issues above have been studied in a compartmentalised, isolated (individual) manner, without showing clear associations between the rights issues, which subsequently and answers to the resource governance and sustainability issues. Additionally, only a few property rights issues, mostly revolving around insecure property rights and ill-defined property rights and their effects, have been investigated in their economic, social and environmental commons contexts (Brown 2015; Kaiser et al. 2018; Lu and Xie 2018; Webster et al. 2016). Other potential property rights issues and their distinct interrelationships, among others, encompassing attenuation of rights, conflicts between de facto and de jure rights, maladaptive rights and incomplete rights, which also influence common resources governance and sustainability . In addition, the above studies were undertaken either in a fully quantitative (Webster et al. 2016) or qualitative (Brown 2015) fashion, that mostly relied on the one-side stakeholder sector. Thus far, little or no research is being done using a mixed-method design, especially taking into account multi-stakeholders’ perspectives across three different sectors, namely public-private-user stakeholders simultaneously, which is believed to provide more holistic views on property rights impacts on commons governance and quality.

Against the above background and justifications, this mixed-method study using a cross-sector, multi-stakeholders’ approach, therefore, examines the commons dilemmas of rural POS^[2] in relation to its consumption and provision/management, and the quality externalities ensued by the diverse, complex property rights structure of Sabah, Malaysia (see Table 1 below). The three-fold research questions addressed in this paper are (i) what are the property rights issues/failures found in the local institutional environment? (ii) What are the possible social-POS management and consumption dilemmas in the local institutions? (iii) What is the connection between the local institutional property rights failures, POS commons dilemmas, and externalities emergence? From an institutional-social-ecological perspective, why and how the local complex property rights system influences rural POS quality and sustainability?

This study is significant because it intends to bridge the lacuna in the theoretical consensus about human behaviours, facing multiple social dilemmas under an adversarial institutional design (institutions and property rights). Moreover, this study is in line with the targets and the essence of global policies and initiatives, namely the 11th and the 12th and the responsible resource production and consumption, respectively, as well as the New Urban Agenda on the importance of providing safe, inclusive, equitable accessible, green, and quality public spaces in both urban and rural areas.

[1]    Urban and rural public open spaces concerning spatiality (e.g., location, shape, and size) and architecture have been strategically planned in the design stage, and the provision of facilities is sufficient, which overall give quality spaces. However, such good condition and quality of POS may not be sustained due to defective consumption and management behaviour issues of individuals.

[2]    The terms including rural POS, POS, rural commons, rural neighbourhood commons, local POS, and neighbourhood residential commons are used interchangeably in this paper because they signify the same resources within the rural setting.