**3. Research approach**

The qualitative research approach was used and Langkawi Island selected as the case study; data collection was conducted from 7th January 2014 until 16th January 2014. Time frame for primary data collection was 10 days with a total of 20 respondents that were asked open-ended questions. Each interview was individually tailored to draw out information from which interviewees could freely express their ideas [32] and make comments regarding community capacity strategies in Langkawi Island. Purposive sampling and snowball sampling were used to identify respondents in the data collection process. Through qualitative interviews, data were collected with four different categories of stakeholders encompassing government officials, local leaders, NGOs, and private companies in order to obtain 'representative characterization' [33]. The semi-structured interviews were recorded and analysed with the framework techniques. All recordings of the interviews were transcribed verbatim and categorised into keywords, followed by indexing, coding, and classifying by themes. Data coding commenced at the beginning of the fieldwork and categorisation of the data into themes was conducted repeatedly and frequently during the analysis phase [34].
