Governing Rural Public Open Spaces in Taigu, China: An SES-Based Collective Action Model Using Delphic Hierarchy Process (DHP)

China’s rural public open spaces (POS) are largely governed as common-pool resources through self-organized collective arrangements, often regarded as a viable pathway to sustainable commons management. Yet, in practice, these systems remain prone to overuse and under-maintenance, reflecting collective action failures associated with the tragedy of the commons. The governance of rural POS therefore constitutes a complex social–ecological problem shaped by the interplay of institutional rules, biophysical conditions, and user–stakeholder interactions. Taking Taigu District in Shanxi Province—characterized by heterogeneous social–ecological contexts and collective action dilemmas—as the empirical case, this study develops a meso-level baseline model to identify the key conditions (design principles) for sustainable rural POS governance. Adopting an expert-based epistemological approach, 24 specialists in rural governance (scholars, planners, and local administrators) were engaged. Grounded in commons and collective action theories within the Social–Ecological Systems (SES) framework and informed by Transaction Cost Economics (TCE), the study operationalizes a Delphic Hierarchy Process (DHP), combining three rounds of Delphi to establish consensus on governance conditions with the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to derive their relative weights. The model specifies 14 governance conditions across four interrelated dimensions: ecological (e.g., clearly defined resource boundaries and congruence between resource characteristics and user needs), institutional (e.g., simple and enforceable rules, accessible conflict-resolution mechanisms, accountable monitoring, and calibrated external support), social (e.g., social capital, leadership capacity, clearly defined user boundaries, and group interdependence), and interactional (e.g., resource dependence, equity in benefit distribution, and supply–demand alignment). It further clarifies their relative importance and systemic interdependencies. By operationalizing commons design principles within a meso-level analytical framework, the study advances their empirical application in rural planning and offers five targeted managerial implications to strengthen institutional robustness and the long-term sustainability of self-governed rural POS.