Enhancing local community participation towards heritage tourism in Taiping, Malaysia: application of the Motivation-Opportunity-Ability (MOA) model

Community participation is critical to tourism development, and how to promote community participation has become one of the major concerns of tourism practitioners and scholars. Although several tourism researchers have applied the MOA model to study the influencing factors of community participation, there is still a lack of literature that can provide adequate empirical support to substantiate the predictive power of the MOA model for examining community participation in the context of tourism, particularly in the context of heritage tourism. Given this gap, this research aims to investigate the influences of motivation, opportunity, and ability on community participation in heritage conservation and heritage tourism development by using the MOA model. This study was conducted in Taiping, Malaysia, a famous heritage town. Data were analysed through complementary methods of partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) and fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). The findings of PLS-SEM showed the significance of residents' perceptions towards positive socio-cultural impacts and opportunity for community participation, whereas the results of fsQCA enriched the interpretation of more complicated relationships and uncovered multiple configurations to enhance community participation. Additionally, this study also provided several practical implications for local authorities to promote community participation.