The fast development of the economy and population growth creates massive demands and pressures on wildlife resources and their living environment. However, development is necessary to improve the livelihoods and socio-economic conditions of local communities but is often difficult to reconcile with the preservation of surrounding ecosystems and biodiversity, including elephants. One of the most visible expressions of this imbalance is human-elephant conflict (HEC), which is a direct result of habitat loss and subsequent conversion of natural land to farmland, leading to increased human-elephant interactions. The purpose of this study is to acquire expert agreement on the perceptions of local communities on the human-elephant conflict in Malaysia by using the Fuzzy Delphi method. This study includes two phases of the development of the elements of the questionnaire, namely the first phase, in which the researcher conducts a literature analysis to identify the elements required for assessing the perceptions of local communities on the human-elephant conflict in Malaysia. In the second phase (Fuzzy Delphi phase), after all items have been obtained, the researcher forms an expert questionnaire, in which 7 items are distributed to 5 experts with specific expertise, and the data collected were analysed using Fudelo 1.0 software. The results of the Fuzzy Delphi analysis of the expert consensus of the theme are at a satisfactory level. The overall expert consensus agreement is greater than 75%, the overall value of the threshold (d) is 0.2 and the ?-cut is more than 0.5. This study gives valuable insights into the human-elephant conflict issue for further improvement in future research.
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In-Text Citation: (Zaini et al., 2022)
To Cite this Article: Zaini, A. A., Kadir, N. A. A., & Ahmad, B. E. (2022). The Perceptions of Local Communities on Human-Elephant Conflict in Malaysia: A Fuzzy Delphi Approach. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 12(9), 830– 838.
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