Application of Analytic Hierarchy Process for Assessing Sustainable Development among Underprivileged Communities

One of the purposes of sustainable development assessment is to identify the most importance criteria and sub-criteria of sustainable development that have the most significant contribution to the local community. To date, few studies have inquired into qualitative methods to assess these criteria and sub-criteria. In response to this gap in the literature, we propose an application of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method to prioritize thirteen sub-criteria of sustainable development among underprivileged community of Setiu Wetlands Terengganu. Consistency ratio and weighted geometric mean are the two important computation steps of the AHP prior to proposing global weights of sub-criteria. The computational results indicate that ‘Education’ is the most important sub-criteria with 15.4 % of global weight. At the other extreme ‘global economic partnership’ is the least important sub-criteria for this group of community. The outcome of the proposed method is a weight of sustainability for all sub-criteria which offers a guide to government in identifying the appropriate action for uplifting the community quality of life.