Reducing Groundwater Contamination from On-Site Sanitation in Peri-Urban Sub-Saharan Africa: Reviewing Transition Management Attributes towards Implementation of Water Safety Plans

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Drs Twinomucunguzi et al.,

Thank you for giving me a chance to review your manuscript "Reducing Groundwater Contamination from On-Site Sanitation in Peri-Urban Sub-Saharan Africa: Reviewing Transition Management Attributes towards Implementation of Water Safety Plans”.

I think the article tackles very relevant problems in a clear and organized way.

Bringing attributes of TM and IWRM for a risk-based framework to eliminate groundwater contamination risks offers a convincing outlook for working toward resilient groundwater supply in SSA.

The following are my details comments:

Line 150: remove “the” prior to socio-institutional factors.

Line 158: “is generally governed”: I would personally use a closer terminology to “follows the principles of IWRM”.

Lines 162-164: check grammar.

Line 178: “Multi-Pattern Perspective”: this term is not further discussed in text, hence I would either develop the concept or remove.

Line 186: principles rather than principals? (appears twice as such).

Lines 185-188: can be more precise in citing URT 2009 Water Act which clearly requires the application of IWRM.

Paragraph of lines 315-328: this paragraph would need some reworking; it is very abstract and needs some further unpacking. Spelling out and examples in more detail would help the reader flow through the paragraph with more ease.

Lines 339-340: “community characteristics” such as?

Lines 341-345: this sounds like an interesting illustration of what can be done, but it remains unclear in this paragraph what the suggestion is.

Lines 350-352: could you give a precision of what you mean by informal stakeholders? Either an example or a definition of what you include under "stakeholders". Could you also define briefly what is meant by customary practices? Would suggest having a look at the work of critical institutionalists.

Lines 358-364: in this paragraph, it is not very precise what is meant by socio-cultural issues; if a precise definition cannot be reached, then a pointer to the fact that it is identified as a gap in literature.

Lines 391-392: could reference here the fact that this vision of sustainability has been criticised for not being empirically implementable as has too many contradictions.

Lines 394-396: could ref here some of the literature on MSPs and limitations in methods on how to pick stakeholders.

Line 410/Figure 3 is too small to read for a printable version of the paper. Difference between what makes a formal actor versus an informal actor is not clear.

Lines 440-443: see literature about the limitations of IWRM conceptually. Some may argue that IWRM is to be questioned rather than strengthened.

Lines 461-464: please cite relevant literature on this point.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Interesting piece. I have provided specific comments in text.

In general, in the literature review, i would expect more work to be done to bring in the general and global picture first. For this reason, reference of the work of:
Francesco Sindico on the Guarani
Gabriel Eckstein and Raya Stephan on groundwater law in general
Alvar Closas, Majd alNaber and Fracoise Molle on the MENA region
Hussam Hussein on the Guarani and on the Disi aquifers (Yarmouk, Disi, Jordan paper)

would be expected. Please revise accordingly and consider adding a section on groundwater management in general as suggested above, and a stronger justification of: why groundwater, why groundwater contamination, and why in SSA.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I enjoyed reading the updated version of the paper, which has definetely improved from the first draft. 

The way forward, however, should include the following revisions:

• the bibliography is not done correctly, see for instance holes in refs. 41, 46, 47, 48. This should be fixed before resubmission and not waiting for production stage.
• I like the section on institutions and groundwaters. Have you read the work of Andreas Thiel and of the new-Ostrom school on this, for instance on polycentric water governance?
• In the section on contamination, I believe you would benefit from mentioning the work done on the Disi Aquifer, as it was an issue of groundwater governance, policy, and contamination too. To face water scarcity, groundwater was pumped 300 km north to the main cities, amid rumours of contamination; here again the link between science, policy, and institutions amid scarcity comes up. As mentioned earlier, see the article "Yarmouk, Jordan, and Disi basins: Examining the impact of the discourse of water scarcity...". You can also read the work of Francesca Greco, amid others, on the Disi Aquifer. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

Much improved