Despite the existing literature regarding institutional influence ontraditional commons, there is still a comparative dearth of research that theorisesproperty-rights structure and its impact on contemporary commons. This isparticularly true for public open space (POS) governance: its management andutilisation and hence its quality, of which underinvestment and overexploitationleads to increasingly negative externalities and outcomes. An interdisciplinarystudy is employed here to depict the relationships of diverse property-rightsstructure attributes – POS title existence, community existence, POS title transfer and POS site handing-over period to local government – with quality ofresidential POS. A cross-sectional survey via direct structured observation witha POS quality audit tool was conducted to collect a randomly stratified sampleof 155 Country Lease (CL) POS and entire 22 Native Title (NT) POS, from thedistricts of Kota Kinabalu and Penampang, Sabah, respectively. Archival searchand document analysis on data of property-rights attributes were executed aswell. Next, 2-stage Pearson’s Chi-Square ( c2) and Lambda (λ) with ProportionalReduction Error feature analyses were performed. Results showed that only thesethree property-rights attributes – title deed existence, community existence andPOS site handing-over period to local government- are significantly associatedwith POS quality at significance level (p≤0.05). It is found that, although POSwith title deed and community’s involvement might not contribute to goodquality, 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, thehigher the likelihood of good POS quality and vice versa. Such empirical findingsprima facie infer that: (i) current local property-rights structure does matter incontributing to POS condition, particularly the effective management right whichlikely leads to better POS quality; (ii) the present state-property regime in POSgovernance is ...