The Impacts of Multi-environmental Constructs on Tourism Destination Competitiveness: Local Residents’ Perceptions

In the rural tourism industry, the environment has emerged to be of most concern to the local communities, followed by social-cultural and economic issues. Stemming from the awareness, the environment has become one of the main pillars for sustainable tourism development, particularly, rural tourism destination. On the other note, in a competitive tourism market, it is important for rural tourism destinations to create competitive advantage in order to attract visitors. Therefore, competitiveness theory underpins the research framework proposed and attempts to examine the impacts of multi-environmental constructs towards the development of rural tourism destination competitiveness. A total of 278 respondents comprising of local communities from rural destinations in Sarawak, Malaysia took part voluntarily in this study. To assess the developed model, SmartPLS 2.0 (M3) is applied based on path modelling and bootstrapping. The findings showed that local residents are in their believed that for a rural tourism destination to enhance its competitiveness, environmental education is the key to increase environmental conservation that lead to better quality of environment. Tourism infrastructure is an added advantage to increase a tourism destination competitiveness. This study further discussed on the implications of the findings, limitations, and direction for future research.


Introduction
Tourism industry is said to be always related to economic contribution. It is either tourism contributes in a larger scale such as country's economic growth or in a smaller scale likes contribute to local communities' welfare and increased their standard of living (Rahmani, Hajari, Karimian, & Hajilo, 2013). Past research has highlighted the positive impact of the tourism industry, and its contribution to economic and social development of local communities (Egbali, Nosrat, & Ali-pour, 2011;Moshabaki & Malek, 2004;Sirakaya, Jamal, & Choi, 2001). Nonetheless, tourism also brings negative outcomes to rural communities, such as crowding, destruction of the natural resources and environment, and increased cost of living (Vargas-Sánchez, Plaza-Mejía, & Porras-Bueno, 2009;Loumou, Giourga, Dimitrakopoulos, & Koukoulas, 2000;Perdue, Long, & Kang, 1999). Thus, this has led to the evolved of sustainable tourism, a proper development of tourism industry that benefited the tourism stakeholders as well as conserving the environment for sustainable use in the future.
The country, Malaysia, famous with its cultural heritage and natural environments has successfully brought in millions of international tourists over the decades. These resources are confirmed as the significant factors for the development of rural tourism. However, Harrill (2004) highlighted that it's important to involve local communities in preserving these resources because of the fact that the communities are the one staying at the rural touristic locations. Rural communities typically derive their livelihood from their local environment, so it is crucial to take their perspective of rural tourism development into perspective. It is important to overcome community concerns and to gain their support for sustainable rural tourism development. Important concerns in generating community support for rural tourism development focus on improvements to the standard of living and quality of life of the local communities. This study is able to identify destination competitiveness with the help of local communities and indirectly improve their standard of living through the creation of job opportunities without destroying the natural environment.
In a competitive tourism market, it is important for rural tourism destinations to create competitive advantage in order to attract visitors. As major environmental components are typically the key competitive features of rural tourism, sustaining improved quality of life and job opportunities in local communities are dependent on preserve these advantages. Hence, to ensure the success of rural tourism development, the perspectives of rural communities needs to be thoroughly investigated (Murphy, 1985). Few studies in Malaysia have considered the importance of environmental constructs on the development of destination competitiveness from the perspectives of local communities. Past research (e.g., Greaves & Skinner, 2010;Hanna & Rowley, 2008) has highlighted that creating unique identities to differentiate one tourism destination from another improves competitive advantage. Hence, multi-environmental constructs and community support for a rural tourism destination obviously increases competitiveness. Hence, this study contributes to the existing literature, and further extends existing knowledge.

Literature Review and Hypotheses Development
The notion of destination competitiveness has been developed (Kim, 2012;Lee & King, 2008;Enright & Newton, 2004;Ritchie & Crouch, 1993) and different definitions proposed. One of the earlier definitions is by Pearce (1997) who defined destination competitiveness as the techniques and methods that possibly apply to analyse and compare the diverse attributes of destinations in the context of planning (Mihalic, 2000). Enright and Newton (2004), in supporting Dwyer and Kim (2003), have developed a newer and more comprehensive model of tourism destination competitiveness. In their model, they integrated generic factors of competitiveness derived from the industry setting and destination attractiveness (Enright & Newton, 2004). Accordingly, to develop a fully competitive destination, natural resources and attractors (e.g., floral and faunal, cultural and heritage attractions) must exist to lure tourists' attention and be integrated with a well strategized marketing strategy to market a tourism destination. This model has received increasing attention from scholars, and consequently, additional components extended the existing model, which include tourism destination resources and attractors, tourism destination strategies, and tourism destination environments (Lee & King, 2008;Wilde & Cox, 2008). In short, competitiveness theory underpins this study and to explain the development of rural tourism destination competitiveness from both comparative advantage (natural resources) and competitive advantage (build resources) for rural tourism destinations.
Of the many studies on environmental constructs and rural tourism destination competitiveness, the majority were about environmental conservation and environmental education of destination competitiveness or carrying capacity of a rural tourism destination and development of tourism destination competitiveness, from the perspective of tourists. There is, however, limited research on the impact of multi-environmental constructs on destination competitiveness from the perspective of local communities. Hence, the present study used multi-environmental constructs (e.g., environmental conservation, environmental education, cultural heritage attraction, tourism infrastructure, carrying capacity, relaxation, quality of environment, and natural resources) as the independent variables and destination competitiveness as the dependent variable.
According to past researchers (e.g., Tribe, Font, Griffiths, Vickery, & Yale, 2000), environmental conservation is defined as a policy or a long-established approach to protection the environment, which involves the designation of protected status for landscapes, habitats or individual species. Past studies have revealed that both tourists and community are increasingly aware of the importance of preserving and conserving the environment, it is vital to promote and cultivate environmental knowledge among them. Preserving a tourism product, in this case a natural amenity, also means sustainability of profits (Reimer & Walter, 2013). One specific issue in tourism development is conserving fauna and flora (Lokuhetty, Jayawardena, & Mudadeniya, 2013) as often they are the main resources that attract tourists. Moreover, multiple environmental management strategies such as environmentally friendly practices, visitor number management, and specific spatial or time zoning have been introduced overtime to minimize the environmental pressures (Pipinos & Fokiali, 2009;Lim & McAleer, 2005), and subsequently increase the competitiveness of the tourism destinations. Hence, the following hypothesis is developed: H1: Environmental conservation is positively related to destination competitiveness.
Environmental education is widely accepted as an integral part of tourism and it contributes to the sustainability of heritage sites and natural environment (Newsome, Moore, & Dowling, 2002;Fennell, 1999). In a case study of Costa Rica, a number of activities were adopted to promote environmental learning (Blum, 2008), and a study by Luck (2003) concluded that nature education increases ecological awareness. A better conserved environment ensures the sustainability of a tourism destination. However, without the cooperation and participation of both local communities and tourists, environmental education in tourism industry does succeed (Sukserm, Thiengkamol, & Thiengkamol, 2012;Thiengkamol, 2008). Hence, it is therefore concluded that environmental education served as a fundamental rule for the development of sustainable tourism destination and also contributed to the competitiveness of the destinations. As such, the following hypothesis is proposed: H2: Environmental education is positively related to destination competitiveness.
On the other hand, the importance of cultural heritage is that it plays a pivotal role in tourism destinations and is a prominent resource in society, especially for rural communities (Park, 2014;Liu, 2013). As millions of people have already travelled across the globe to experience different types of heritage and personal nature (Dallen, 2006), the number of visitors willing to travel to tourism destinations with the intention to experience a different cultural heritage is increasing. It is therefore important for a rural destination to conserve its existing cultural heritage attractions in order to maintain its attraction value and develop its cultural resources to increase destination competitiveness and sustainability over time (Taylor, Daye, Kneafsey, & Barrett, 2014;Bowitz & Ibenholt, 2009). In particular, cultural heritage not only attracts tourists, but it also helps to enrich people's lives by providing a deep sense of connection to the past and by building the local community's identity (Chu & Uebegang, 2002). Therefore, the following hypothesis is framed: H3: Cultural heritage attraction is positively related to destination competitiveness.
As defined by Inskeep (1991), tourism infrastructure is the physical elements created or made for visitors. The obvious remoteness of rural tourism destinations means that transportation infrastructure supply is limited. Therefore, accessibility has become the utmost concerned by tourists who plan for a visit to the rural tourism destination. Prideaux (2000) has revealed that the availability of good transportation system is important, because tourists can enjoy the journey in a comfortable way. Thus, the availability of quality transportation infrastructure plays a significant role for the development of rural tourism destination competitiveness. This is because of the facts that tourists are able to travel from one destination to a rural tourism destination with minimum travelling costs and experiencing maximum travel comfort. Hence, the following hypothesis is developed: H4: Tourism infrastructure is positively related to destination competitiveness.
The earlier definition of carrying capacity by World Tourism Organization (1999), and is defined as the maximum number of people that may visit a tourist destination at the same time, without causing destruction of the physical, economic, or socio-cultural environment. Past studies (Mathew, 2009;Dwyer, 2001;Mihalic, 2000) have revealed that carrying capacity plays a significant role for the development of rural tourism destination competitiveness. In fact, controlling the maximum numbers of tourists visiting a rural touristic destination at a specific time frame is a must to maintain its resources for competitiveness over time. The concept of mass tourism is not acceptable in rural tourism destinations due to the fact that the increasing numbers of tourists visiting at a time would lead to the degradation of part of the natural resources. Therefore, the following hypothesis is proposed: H5: Carrying capacity is positively related to destination competitiveness.
Having support from tourists is important to the future successful development of rural tourism destinations as the tourists will contribute to the destinations' economic development. The term relaxation is defined as a person taking the time to pursue tourism activities of interest with the intention to getting away from the everyday routine, to gain good experiences (Crompton, 1979). Tourists are motivated to pay for a visit to rural tourism destinations due to its natural and relaxation environment which totally a different experience to gain as compare to any urban tourism. Yu (2014) stated that most tourists are motivated by the peace and natural environment of a destination for relaxation. Past studies have documented that relaxation was a central distinguishing motivational theme offered by a particular rural tourism destination to attract more tourists' visits (Mazilu & Stancioiu, 2009;Park & Yoon, 2009). As such the following hypothesis is proposed: H6: Relaxation is positively related to destination competitiveness.
Quality of environment is understood to be one of the important contributors to the development of destination competitiveness (Kayar & Kozak, 2008;Kulcsar, 2009). A definition of quality of environment, developed by Mihalic (2000), is defined as the quality of the natural features, such as beautiful scenery, natural hydrologic structures, clean water, fresh air and species diversity, of the destination that can deteriorate as a result of human activities. In fact, achieving quality requires both tourists and local community to actively participate in improving the environment and not further decrease the environmental conditions. Thus, in a rural tourism destination, to maintain a quality environment, community participation is required to aid in the protection of environmental resources and to ensure sustainability of natural ecology (Wang, Yang, Chen, Yang, & Li, 2010), and subsequently increase the destination's competitiveness. Based on these grounds, the following hypothesis is developed: H7: Quality of environment is positively related to destination competitiveness.
Over the past, flora and fauna species are included as the components of natural resources (Crouch & Ritchie, 1999). Accordingly, because natural resources of a tourism destination, in particular a rural tourism destination, act as a critical attribute that attract visitors and as the basis of destination competitiveness (Lane, 2009;Crouch & Ritchie, 1999), one of the basic criteria for tourists in making travel decision choices is the quality of natural resources of a particular tourism destination. Therefore, for a tourism destination to achieve market growth and vitality (Ross, 1994), it must ensure the sustainability of natural resources (Lee & King, 2008) and maintain the quality of tourism resources (Yoon, 2002;Go & Govers, 2000). Hence, the following hypothesis is developed: H8: Natural resources are positively related to destination competitiveness.
Overall, based on the hypotheses developed and the research framework is proposed as in Figure 1.

Methodology
Data were collected from local communities in three rural tourism destinations in Sarawak, namely Bario Kelabit Highland, Annah Rais Bidayuh Longhouse and Bako National Park in Sarawak, Malaysia. In present research, the exploratory approach includes the distribution of questionnaires. Data were collected through questionnaires administered by face-to-face interview in the local communities of three rural tourism destinations in Sarawak, Malaysia. In the present study, the minimum sample size (n = 140) was calculated using the formula as below taken from Hair, Black, Babin, Anderson and Tatham (2010). Overall, a total of 278 respondents comprising of local communities from Kampung Annah Rais and Kampung Bako, and Bario Kelabit Highlands, Sarawak took part voluntarily in this study.
The questionnaire comprised two sections. Section I measured the communities' perceptions on the importance of multi-environmental constructs toward destination competitiveness, and also their support. Section II gathered background information of the respective respondents. The items on the questionnaire were based on the works of researchers in the field (Gebhard, Meyer, & Roth, 2007;Dwyer & Kim, 2003;Mihalic, 2000;Yoon, Gursoy, & Chen, 2000;Jurowski, 1994;Perdue, Long, & Allen, 1990), which, developed for research in western countries, were slightly modified to adapt to the Malaysian context. The respondents (local communities) were asked to indicate their perception on the importance of multi-environmental constructs towards the development of tourism destination competitiveness. Pre-testing was conducted at Annah Rais Bidayuh Longhouse with 20 respondents selected randomly from the local community. From this pre-test, 3 respondents were invited to further refine the questionnaire through a personal discussion session. Some of the questions were revised and finalized versions of questionnaires were used to proceed for final data collection. This ensured the questionnaire created was clear, not too hard to understand, reliable and the data collected can be meaningfully analysed. The current study employs a quantitative approach in testing the hypotheses developed via the analysis of data collected from the self-administered questionnaires. Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 21.0 for Microsoft Windows and SmartPLS 2.0 (M3) were used to analyze the data.

Assessment of the Measurement Model
First, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted to test the item reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity of the measurements scales. As shown in Table 1, all the items loading (showed in final iteration) exceeded the minimum cut off point of 0.50 (Bagozzi, Yi, & Philipps, 1991), thus, the internal consistency was achieved. In terms of convergent validity, all the composite reliability (CR) values were above the minimum cut off point of 0.7 (Chin, 2010) and majority of the average variance extracted (AVE) values meet the minimum criteria of 0.50 (Fornell & Larcker, 1981). On the other note, Fornell and Larcker (1981) also suggested that AVE values below 0.5 but larger than 0.4 still acceptable with the conditions that the CR values were larger than 0.6. For discriminant validity (see Table 2), the value of AVE will be square rooted and testify against the intercorrelations of the construct with other constructs in the research model and all the values noted as greater than each of the constructs correlations (Chin, 2010). The model comes with a 0.627 R-Square value. Hence, the measurement model was satisfactory and provided sufficient evidences in term of reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity.

Assessment of the Structural Model
Next, Table 3 presents the results of the hypotheses testing. Interestingly, the statistical results showed that four out of eight hypotheses tested were supported. The results revealed that environmental conservation, environmental education, tourism infrastructure, and quality of environment were positive significantly related to destination competitiveness. Surprisingly, cultural heritage attraction, carrying capacity, relaxation, and natural resources were found no relationship with destination competitiveness. Hence, H1, H2, H4, and H7, were supported, whereas H3, H5, H6, and H8 were rejected.

Discussion
Past studies indicate that there is substantial literature documenting the importance of environmental components towards the development of rural tourism destination competitiveness (e.g., Fons, Fierro, & Patino, 2011;Tsaur, Lin, & Lin, 2006;Mihalic, 2000) Therefore, effective heritage conservation management and environmental education among communities are crucial in sustaining the competitiveness of a country tourism industry  (Reimer & Walter, 2013). No known empirical research on multi-environmental constructs and destination competitiveness was found that examines a set of environmental components and its impact on destination competitiveness in a rural setting. It is however, recognized that local community attitudes and perceptions toward tourism development highly influence the success and failure of tourism development. Further, environmental components are crucial in determining the sustainability and competitiveness of a rural tourism destination (Kim, 2012;Chandralal, 2010). Informed by this extant research, this study is the first to test the effect of multi-environmental constructs and destination competitiveness from rural tourism destinations in the Malaysian context.
The resulting analysis for hypothesis 1 showed that environmental conservation had a significant positive impact on destination competitiveness from the local communities' point of view. The finding of this study is congruent with the studies by Diaz and Rodriguez (2008), and Zhang and Lei (2012). They highlighted that conservation as the focal point for successful development of destination competitiveness. This study revealed that communities are aware of the importance of environmental resources which act as the unique selling proposition for rural tourism. Thus, communities are in their opinions that conserving the environmental resources would lead to a better development of rural tourism destination competitiveness. Hence, this study has provided compelling evidence that environmental conservation is to be an added advantage for the development of rural destinations competitiveness in Sarawak.
In addition to that, it was found that environmental education had a significant positive impact on destination competitiveness, and hypothesis 2 was supported. Environmental education plays a vital role in sustaining environmental resources; it is impossible to succeed in tourism development without taking the environment into account (Fons et al, 2011). Environmental education refers to increased understanding of environmental issues, awareness and skill development (Blum, 2008), which lead to the sustainable management of natural environments (Bhuiyan, Siwar, Ismail, & Islam, 2010). Hence, sustainability is the key to maintain the destinations' competitiveness.
The results of the statistical analysis show that hypothesis 4 was supported; tourism infrastructure was found to have significant positive impact on destination competitiveness. The finding is congruent and further support the earlier findings that infrastructure has a strong linkage with tourism destination competitiveness (Crouch, 2007;Khadaroo & Seetanah, 2008;Hsueh & Yeh, 2014). The safety issues of touristic areas always come into concerned by tourists in making decision to visit. In this regard, communities agreed that a quality tourism infrastructure plays a crucial role in affecting tourists' intention to visit a rural tourism destination.
Consistent with previous studies, the findings of this study revealed that quality of environment had a significant impact on destination competitiveness, and thus hypothesis 7 was supported. The findings of the present study supports the works from previous studies (e.g., Kayar & Kozak, 2008;Williams & Cary, 2002), whereby it was found that the quality of environment is a strong determinant in development of destination competitiveness. One of the main reasons to support this finding is that almost all of the tourists visiting a rural touristic area due its natural environment. Hence, the quality of environment is an important contributor for promising tourists' travel experience.
Surprisingly, four of the environmental constructs (e.g., cultural heritage attraction, carrying capacity, relaxation, & natural resources) were found no significant relationship with tourism destination competitiveness. The statistical finding of hypothesis 3 has indicated that cultural heritage attraction has no significant impact on destination competitiveness. This unexpected result may be explained by the fact that the local communities have limited knowledge and capacities to employ their cultural resources in an effective way (Dugulan, Balaure, Popescu, & Veghes, 2010). Furthermore, Kulscar (2009) highlighted that the most important factor contributing to the attractiveness and competitiveness of rural tourism destinations is the natural environment (e.g., clean natural environment, fresh air, quiet, and the rural lifestyle) other than cultural heritage. On the other hand, the findings show that carrying capacity had a significant negative relationship on destination competitiveness, and thus hypothesis 5 was rejected. The findings of this study is contradicted with the findings by Richards and Hall (2000) and Wilde and Cox (2008). It is justifiable by the fact that the current volume of tourists visiting the study sites are still in a managerial level. Local residents believed that more tourists should come in order to generate more income to the community.
Moreover, relaxation and natural resources also found no significant relationship with destination competitiveness, and thus, H6 and H8 were rejected. The reason could be due to the fact that local communities deem the relaxation condition cannot be achieved without their involvement and support, as they have the best knowledge of the rural destination, and being constantly exposed to that rural natural environment means they understand which locations provide the best environmental conditions and natural resources for relaxation. On the other hand, communities who are constantly exposed to the natural resources are unaware of the important of natural resources as an attraction point for tourists. Thus, communities do not think that the natural resources would provide an advantage for the development of destination competitiveness.

Conclusions, Implications and Recommendations
In sum, the competitiveness of a rural tourism destination is very much dependent on the availability of environmental and natural resources to lure tourists (Lokuhetty et al., 2013). The majority of international tourists as well as locals visit rural destination to escape stressful working environments. However, the increasing number of tourists may lead to decreased environmental resources for a tourism destination if not properly managed. Both natural and man-made resources need to be at high standard of quality if a rural tourism destination is to maintain it comparative and competitive advantages over other tourism destinations (Angelkova, Koteski, Jakovlev, & Mitrevska, 2012). Therefore, the findings of this study has revealed and confirmed that local communities believed tourism infrastructure is the main determinant for the development of rural tourism destination competitiveness. On the other note, the quality of environment also plays a significant role in creating a comparative advantage for a touristic destination. This is because of the fact that tourists are mostly attracted by the good quality of natural environment and resources available at a destination to maximise their satisfaction. Finally, local communities also believed that both environmental conservation practices and environmental education highly determined the development of rural tourism destination competitiveness.
To this extent, the results of this study add to the growing body of research on the influence of environmental components on rural tourism destination competitiveness. Furthermore, this study attempts to further understand local community attitudes and perspectives towards the influence of multi-environmental constructs on destination competitiveness from three rural tourism destinations. These findings can be valuable to local planners, policy makers, and business operators on the effective implementation of rural tourism development. Hence, destination competitiveness is increasingly important in current competitive market, particularly in the context of rural tourism. The fundamental attractors for a rural tourism destination are heavily dependent on the availability of natural resources and tourism amenities. Thus, the sustainability and competitive stance of a rural tourism destination is influenced by the variety of environmental constructs. As such, further investigation into environmental constructs and destination competitiveness is strongly recommended.