Modelling the community leadership in improving community engagement towards successful waste segregation program / Khalid Yusof

The community engagement in waste segregation activity is still not encouraging. Even though the government has established Act 673 which requires citizen to separate waste in 2015, there is a need to encourage more participation of community members in waste segregation activities. The objectives of this research are to determine the current challenges and its effects with the attributes of community leadership for successful waste segregation program. Secondly, it is to examine the attributes of community leadership and its effects with local authority performance for successful waste segregation program. . Thirdly, to analyze the local authority performance and its effect with current challenges in household waste segregation and finally to evaluate the mediating effect of local authority performance on the relationship between the current challenges in household waste segregation with the attributes of community leadership. The study was conducted in 4 areas authorized under SWCorp Malacca where 800 respondents were involved in answering the structured questionnaires from the total population of 932,700 in 2020. In addition, 32 semi-structured interviews were conducted with the community leaders and 17 with the authorities, operator and waste experts. The quantitative data were evaluated through SPSS 26.0 and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) using IBMSPSS-AMOS 24.0 whereas the qualitative data were evaluated through Atlas-Ti. The results confirm the hypotheses to determine the direct and significant effect among the constructs. It is found that the current challenges in household waste segregation have significant effect on the attributes of community leadership for successful waste segregation program. However, the current challenges in household waste segregation have no significant effect on the local authority performance. Next, the local authority performance has significant effect on the attributes of community leadership for successful waste segregation program. Finally, the local authority performance does not mediate the relationship between the current challenges in household waste segregation with the attributes of community leadership. Through the findings from preliminary study, questionnaires and interviews session, a Structural Equation Model was the developed to determine the relationship between the constructs. Hence, community leadership is the main focus for improving the waste segregation activities in the community and the model can be replicated by community leaders of other states in Malaysia.