Community participation in tourism development in city destination / Andy Faizal Sahapadin

The development of the tourism industry in Malaysia started 45 years ago during the economic downturn in the 1970's. There are myriads of plans to bolster the tourism industry in Malaysia. Programmes and projects under the plans are being executed to meet the targets set and to achieve the desired outcomes. Plans that do not fit or fail to receive local community participation during the early planning stage of a project cycle often lead to failure of achieving its goal, which is really to benefit the local community. The main objective of this research is to determine the level and the barriers to community participation in the tourism development in the Kota Kinabalu city. Based on the previous studies, three (3) categories of barriers which are operational, structural and culture are examined in this research to determine and conclude whether they serve as barriers to tourism development in Kota Kinabalu. Thus, in using the quantitative method, the researcher randomly selected 250 respondents from Kota Kinabalu city as a sample size. Of 250 questionnaires distributed, 149 were returned. One of the tools used by the researcher was descriptive statistics in which the researcher looked at the frequency and means to examine the level of community participation and to analyse the barriers to community participation in tourism development in Kota Kinabalu. Apart from that, the researcher also used Mann-Whitney U test to investigate the differences in the levels of participation between male and female. Kruskal-Wallis test was done to check the differences of participation in tourism development in term of age. In order to investigate the correlation between the respondents' age and the level of participation, the Spearmen's rho test was used and the Pearson Chi-square test was used to investigate the relationship between gender and the level of participation. These research findings have identified and briefly discussed the barriers to community participation in tourism development in Kota Kinabalu. In short, the research found that the level of community participation in tourism development in Kota Kinabalu is relatively low. Three barriers, which are operational, structural and cultural, have been identified as barriers to community participation in tourism development in Kota Kinabalu.