Institutions on Public Open Space Governance

Meagre discussion on the institutional property-rights structure essence has rudimentarily determined the POS governance and its quality. Thus, two objectives are highlighted; (i) to examine Sabah’s current practice (rights distribution) in urban-rural POS governance and (ii) explore the POS’ social dilemmas that tied in with such institution. Reviews of interdisciplinary analytic perspectives, content analysis on documents and semi-structured interviews were performed. The practice with diverse property-rights structure is indicatively perceived as “property-rights tragedies”, which ensue in sub-optimal POS and quality of life issues. Therefore, re-engineering of POS market via dynamic property-rights re-assignment is postulated as the panacea for improved wellbeing. Keywords: Diverse property-rights structure; POS governance; social dilemmas; quality of life. eISSN 2514-751X © 2018. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open-access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21834/aje-bs.v3i10.314