Fostering the Sustainable Development Goals from an Ecosystem Conducive to the SE: The Galician’s Case

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Overall comments:

The paper is very interesting and has a substantial potential to enrich the current discourse in Sustainable Development Goals and Social Economy. The research brings a very interesting and unique case into the discussion and explores its implications that are worth discussing for the global impact of the local community level implementation of social economy and cooperatives. This research is expected to substantially contribute to expanding the scholarly efforts in examining the broad impact of the social economy across the globe in association with the UN's SDGs platform. This paper may improve if the author(s) may consider the following points for its revision.

Major points:

It would be helpful if the author(s) clearly state the research question(s) in the early part of the paper in order to help readers understand more clearly about the research's objectives and contribution.

The employment effect assessment may have to provide more details on the comparable counterpart on employment statistics in order to justify its claim that the cooperatives contribute more to female hiring. This paper states that the overall employment of females of 37 percent shows the contribution of cooperatives (p. 12, Line 429). However, this paper does not provide comparable reference group statistics that show how high this 37 percent is compared to the overall economy and industry criteria. What statistics can be compared? The author(s) simply states that the female member ratio is higher than the average without providing the details on female employment rate year, by industry, and by sectors. (p.12, line 435) to clearly and logically back up the claim.

The impact assessment should be clearly defined in the paper (Section Five). The author should re-define the impact in the paper in association with the SDGs as stated in the objectives of this paper. This will make this paper coherent in terms of the research objectives, data collection, and evaluation. From this perspective, it might not be much convincing to include budget spending as part of the impact assessment. The budget spending could be part of the governmental policy and legal scheme itself, rather than the impact. Spending more money does not automatically lead to social impact. The author(s) themselves cautiously mentioned that this budget spending does not indicate causality. Therefore, this budget tracking may be put into the background section of government policies, rather than as part of the impact section.

Although the authors tried to show the connection between SDGs and the SE, it does not show strong evidence that the local autonomous community’s cooperatives aimed to contribute to the SDGs. Showing a few indicators (workers’ cooperatives ratio, female hiring ratio, rural activities ratio, etc) without directly connecting to the UN’s SDGs’ components and their actual incorporation into Galicia’s decision making/ policy implementation does not seem to be much persuasive. Are these elements clearly part of the SDGs’ achievements or are these just an increase in diversity measures in a conventional way? Are these overlapping components between the conventional way of measuring diversity/inclusion and the UN’s SDGs just coincidence or clear logical connection, inherent to SE?  (Could the authors provide some documents that the autonomous community's leaders and/or lawmakers discussed those goals in the formation and implementation of such laws as the evidence to back up the author(s)' claims complementarily? The author(s) may also consider analyzing the bylaws, mission/objectives, operating rules, code of ethics, standard procedures of cooperatives that logically show the connection between SE and SDGs.)

The author(s) state(s) that the rural area activities and relocation are high for the cooperatives. But the paper does not provide more details on to what extent, and how these statistics are comprised of, by the types of activities that are connected to actual impacts. The only statistics provided is the total proportion (65%) of activities located in rural areas (p. 11, line 420). Is this the effect of the SEs? The paper does not provide any comparable reference group that shows whether this number is high, and to what extent, compared to other cities/communities that are not based on SE. The authors also have to clarify what types of activities are included in the geographical distribution analysis.

At the end of the impact section, the author(s) suddenly introduce(s) new ideas that have not been fully elaborated in the paper throughout the paper. These are completely new ideas that need to be explained. Do(es) the author (s) actually have a detailed method to include the elaborated version of these suggestions? How does that affect the discussion on the SE’s contribution to SDGs of this paper? If the author(s) clarify the clear connections and methods to demonstrate them, it would be very helpful.

“Finally, in view of the overall economic context, it would be desirable to support the improvement of entity size by establishing explicit support for concentration processes. In the same vein, support should be provided for the internationalization of SE organizations. The introduction of these improvements should contribute to the increased competitiveness of these entities, multiplying the effects and expected results.” (p.14, line 506 -510)

This research has to add a section on research limitation. The limitation section may highlight some crucial parts in research methodology and analysis, including, but not limited to, the lack of theoretical framework that clearly connects the SE and SDGs, the lack of comparable reference groups to justify the effectiveness and impact of the Galicia’s case, insufficiency in data collection and evidence, limitations as a single case study in generalization, etc. among others else.

Minor points:

The author(s) may have to revise the title of the paper. The name of the act or law itself may not be a recommended way to label a paper. The authors may have to summarize the key idea and focus of the paper and then use it as the main title. For example, the authors may state the title like “Fostering the Sustainable Development Goals from an Ecosystem Conducive to the SE: A Case of Galician Social Economy Act”. This is just an example. The title still seems to be unnecessarily long. If the author(s) can make the title more succinct in the way that better captures the core idea of this research, that would be desirable.

The author(s) may consider re-organizing paragraphs to make the sections and paper more coherent and structured. Sometimes, one or two sentences were left as an independent paragraph in the paper (For example, page 11 (line 382-383), page 14 (several separate paragraphs, not coherently organized/structured). If the author(s) restructure or organize paragraphs in a way that increases the coherent flow of the paper, that would increase the quality of the paper writing.

Author Response

We thank very much the reviewer for the positive comments about our study, which the reviewer considers interesting. The reviewer provides us a number of interesting and highly pertinent comments and suggestions which helped us to improve our manuscript substantially. We appreciate very much all the time and effort devoted to our paper and the feedback given. Below, we present our answers and precise actions with regards to the points raised by the referee.

#1. The reviewer feels that ‘The paper is very interesting and has a substantial potential to enrich the current discourse in Sustainable Development Goals and Social Economy. The research brings a very interesting and unique case into the discussion and explores its implications that are worth discussing for the global impact of the local community level implementation of social economy and cooperatives. This research is expected to substantially contribute to expanding the scholarly efforts in examining the broad impact of the social economy across the globe in association with the UN's SDGs platform. This paper may improve if the author(s) may consider the following points for its revision’.

We thank you for this constructive comment and we have now modified the paper quite substantially in accordance to your point of view and suggestions. We believe that our revised version is certainly improved as a result of following them. We feel that this revised version, inasmuch as it has been substantially modified, is notably stronger and more focussed in its contribution to expanding the scholarly efforts in examining the broad impact of the SE.

#2. We appreciate the suggestions regarding to the logic of the paper. Following your recommendation, we have tried to distinguish our proposal earlier in the paper. In the revised manuscript, we have introduced a phrase to highlight the focus of our study (lines 62 to 64):

‘Additional efforts are therefore needed to link the SE to progress in achieving the SDGs. This study addresses this research gap by examining this relationship from a theoretical point of view’

Additionally, we inform the potential readers about the main objectives of the paper in the second page, by adding the main research questions:

To do that, this paper draws on the scarce literature on the role of SE in achieving SDGs to address the following research questions:

(1)           What is the relationship between SDGs and SE?

(2)           How can be fostered SE from a subnational approach?

(3)           What are the links between the policies aimed to improve SE and the achievement of SDGs?

(4)           Might be a regional approach to foster SE more effective than a national one to contribute to achieve SDGs?

#3. According to the editor´s concern about the female’ employment effect, he/she rightly point out that we had not ‘included comparable reference group statistics that show how high this 37 percent is compared to the overall economy and industry criteria’. We thank you for alerting us about this important omission. To address this deficiency, we carried out a comprehensive review of official data to provide some comparable references. In this revised version we have highlighted the female employment effects by adding the following explanation (pg. 13, line 454):  

In this regard, according to official data disclosed by both the National Statistical Institute and the Galician Institute of Statistics(2018) the percentage of women in cooperatives is far higher than the presence of women in the decision-making bodies of IBEX35 companies (27 %) and that the percentage on managerial roles on Galician’s organizations (31 %). Moreover, the gap between women's cooperative entrepreneurship and its presence in other types of business initiatives is clearer, namely the ratio of creation of Galician companies founded exclusively by women or organizations where most of the founding persons are women (19.8 %).

#4. We totally agree with the reviewer’s comment about the wrong inclusion of budget spending as part of the impact assessment, and with his/her advice on putting the budget tracking on the background section of government policies. In the revised version we have removed this part of the assessment section and move it into the aforementioned section of Galician’s public policies. We have also reordered the final part of this section, in order to highlight this budgetary effort.

#5. The reviewer raises doubts on the evidence that the autonomous community’s cooperative aim to contribute to the SDGs. He/she also provides some recommendations on how to discuss this connection.

In our view, to explore the link between Galician’s cooperatives and SGDs is out of the scope of this paper, since we focus on the leadership of Galician’s government in the design of public policies aimed to foster SE. In turn, and according to our literature review, these organizations might be beneficial in order to accomplish SGDs. Nevertheless, we agree with the reviewer’s appreciation on the weakness of our evidence. Consequently, and according to his/her suggestion, we have included this paragraph on page 14 (at the end of the impact assessment section).

All in all, it would be premature to establish a causal relationship between the measures proposed by the LSEG and the results previously detailed. Even more, it might be also risky to link the public policies in the region and the accomplishment of the international agenda that constitutes the SDGs. Nevertheless, it should be noted that this ecosystem has proven being beneficial to SE, so it can be inferred that Galician’s government have been already working on the accomplishment of SDGs even not deliberately. Regarding this point, the European Commission (2016) noted that the participation of subnational governments favors to implement development strategies that are more closely linked to a specific context, and, therefore, to citizenship [59,60]. Also, this participation is also important in terms of monitoring the achievement of the SDGs, since regional governments are better suited to provide more precise information through the disaggregation of the available data and statistics. Monitoring this information is a crucial element in the context of the new sustainable development agenda. Taking into account these recommendations and the results of our study, Galician’s government has taking the first steps along a highly demanding path.

In the same vein, we also have expanded on limitations of the study. We have paid particular attention to the problems with our findings. Hence, we refer to this concern in the limitations (pg. 15):

Finally, it would be premature to establish a causal relationship between the measures proposed by the LSEG and the results previously detailed. Regarding this point, some limitations should be noted. As has been previously noted, we have only three years to analyze the effects of the ecosystem deployed. Moreover, our data are descriptive, so our results might be due to serendipity. Additionally, there are barely official data to stablish rigorous comparations between the evolution and location of SE entities -and more specifically, of cooperatives- and other kind of organizations. This limitation prevents us to make solid comparations to other groups of entities. In the same vein, it should be noted that we have explained a specific regional case, so we cannot generalize these preliminary outcomes. Consequently, more time and research are needed to address these caveats. In particular, future research should explore the autonomous community leaders’ discourses to analyze if the SDGs Agenda is a real priority. It also might analyze the internal structure and functioning of cooperatives in order to further explore the connection between them and SDGs

#6. Regarding the reviewer’s warning on our data on rural activities, unfortunately we do not have official data to evaluate if this participation on cooperatives on rural areas is representative. We only wanted to highlight that the presence of these entities is more important on these areas than in urban ones, so cooperatives have potential to rebalance economic activity across the territory. All in all, we also included this limitation on the reviewed version (Additionally, there are barely official data to stablish rigorous comparations between the evolution and location of SE entities -and more specifically, of cooperatives- and other kind of organizations.)

#7. The reviewer also noted that ‘At the end of the impact section, the author(s) suddenly introduce(s) new ideas that have not been fully elaborated in the paper throughout the paper. These are completely new ideas that need to be explained. Do(es) the author (s) actually have a detailed method to include the elaborated version of these suggestions? How does that affect the discussion on the SE’s contribution to SDGs of this paper? If the author(s) clarify the clear connections and methods to demonstrate them, it would be very helpful’. We acknowledge that this paragraph is only an opinion, so we decided to remove it and leave these arguments to another paper. Thank you very much for this warning.

#8. The reviewer alerts us to the absence of a limitations section. As has been previously noted, we have introduced this section in this new version of the paper. We have explicitly included the reviewer’s comments, so we are very grateful for these recommendations.

#9. The reviewer also adds some comments on the title of our work. According this suggestion, we have changed the title in the new version: Fostering the Sustainable Development Goals from an ecosystem conducive to the SE: the Galician’s case.

#10. Presentation. The reviewer suggested that we must re-organizing paragraphs to make the sections and paper more coherent and structured. We thank you for this suggestion. As noted before, we have now given a clearer description of the aims, objectives, and contribution of this paper early on in the manuscript. We have modified the paper substantially in accordance with the reviewer.

In conclusion, we thank you again for your constructive review points and suggestions.  We feel that the revised version satisfies all your valuations and trust that responses to all of suggestions and comments responds to your review.

Finally, let us reiterate that we have learned a lot from the comments and suggestions of the editor and reviewers, and that our view of the scope of SGDs in Galicia is much wider now as a result. As a result of these modifications and substantial revisions, we feel that this version of our manuscript is much improved and provides a far sharper focus and presentation of our key findings. We do believe that our findings have implications for theory and practitioners. We also would suggest that our study contributes directly to shed light on the role of SE as a vehicle to accomplish SGDs. We finally feel that our findings have a good prospect of being influential to open a neglected area of research in Galicia.

Reviewer 2 Report

You did a good job on Galicia's, Spain, normative implementation on the subject of Social Economy.

Since this paper is being published on an international journal, maybe it would have been good to provide a brief legal background about State and autonomous communities' competence development in different subjects, and its reach, in Spain in order to explain the reason why when a statewide legal bill on social economy exists, the autonomous community of Galicia has passed a new one.

This paper has a complete bibliography, but there's a specific paper can enrich the relation between sustainable development and social economy, Chaves & Monzón: "Beyond the crisis: the social economy, prop of a new model of sustainable economic development" available on https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11628-011-0125-7

Author Response

We thank very much the reviewer for the positive comments about our study, which the reviewer considers interesting. The reviewer provides us an interesting and highly pertinent suggestion which helped us to improve our manuscript substantially. We appreciate very much all the time and effort devoted to our paper and the feedback given. Below, we present our answers and precise actions with regards to the points raised by the referee.

#1. The reviewer feels that ‘You did a good job on Galicia's, Spain, normative implementation on the subject of Social Economy’.

We thank you for this positive comment. We are very pleased with this appreciation. Taking advantage of the opportunity to re-submit a new version of the paper, we tried to enhance our work. We feel that this revised version is notably stronger and more focussed in its contribution to expanding the scholarly efforts in examining the broad impact of the SE.

#2. The reviewer notes that ‘since this paper is being published on an international journal, maybe it would have been good to provide a brief legal background about State and autonomous communities' competence development in different subjects, and its reach, in Spain in order to explain the reason why when a statewide legal bill on social economy exists, the autonomous community of Galicia has passed a new one’.

We thank you for this constructive comment. Following your recommendation, we have included this footnote on page 2:

^[1] According to the Spanish Constitution (1978), Spain is a regionalised State, also referred to as “Estado de las Autonomías". Art. 143 in the Constitution foresaw the possibility to create Autonomous Communities. Galicia, with the Basque Country and Catalonia, were the first ones to adopt their own Statutes of Autonomy by using the procedure of Art. 151. According to Article 149.3, some matters may fall under the jurisdiction of the Autonomous Community, by virtue of their respective Statutes. For example, Autonomous Communities are responsible for the legislative development and implementation of the State legislation and for the Promotion of economic development within the frame of the national policy. In turn, the Statute of Autonomy of Galicia recognizes in article 55.3 the power of this Autonomous Community to make use of the powers provided in section 1 of article 130 of the Constitution, including the modernization and development of all economic sectors, which may boost them through its own legislation. By exerting this competence, Galicia approved its own Social Economy Act in 2016.

#3. We agree to the reviewer’s suggestion on that the inclusion of Chaves & Monzón (2011) work might enrich our view on the relationship between sustainable development and social economy. According to this comment, we have included this paragraph on page 5 (line 159 to 163).

In sum, these entities have been shown to have social benefits. In their comprehensive review on SE outcomes, Chaves and Monzón [61] highlighted among these results those from an economic approach such as correcting imbalances in  the  labor  market,  producing  merit  goods,  local  development  and  self-government, social cohesion, social innovation,  democratizing  the  business  function  and  contributing to a fairer distribution of income and wealth

Finally, let us reiterate that we have learned a lot from the comments and suggestions of the editor and reviewers, and that our view of the scope of SGDs in Galicia is much wider now as a result. As a result of these modifications and substantial revisions, we feel that this version of our manuscript is much improved and provides a far sharper focus and presentation of our key findings. We do believe that our findings have implications for theory and practitioners. We also would suggest that our study contributes directly to shed light on the role of SE as a vehicle to accomplish SGDs. We finally feel that our findings have a good prospect of being influential to open a neglected area of research in Galicia.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I greatly appreciated all the revision efforts of the author. The revised version demonstrates the sufficient and adequate actions taken by the authors to respond to the suggestions. Given that some of the requested data are not available and some requests were beyond the scope of the paper, the revised version has met the criteria for publication successfully. The authors also clarified the paper’s limitations as well as its broader implication/contribution to the field and academia. Again, I think highly of the authors’ efforts to bring this significant theme to the table for the on-going discussion of the roles of SEs in association with SDGs, starting with the Galician case.

I noticed only a few typos or grammatical errors. With fixing these minimal issues, I trust that this paper will be set to go out to be shared with readers through its publication.

All in all, congratulations to all the authors for the achievement!

#2

How can be fostered SE from a subnational approach?

==> How can SEs be fostered from a subnational approach? (I am not sure whether this is appropriate correction. Please feel free to re-revise or re-edit it if my suggestion is not to the point)

#5

Galician’s government has taking the first steps along a highly demanding path.

==>  “has taken” or “has been taking”?

#6

Additionally, there are barely official data to stablish rigorous comparations between the evolution and location of SE entities -and more specifically, of cooperatives- and other kind of organizations.

==> establish? Or make?

Author Response

First, we thank you very much for your comments about grammar and punctuation. We appreciate very much all the time and effort devoted to our paper and the feedback given. We have carefully followed all your suggestions and tested the present version with a professional editor. We also have rewritten and clarified some sentences according to your suggestions. We hope that this version is free from these errors. Below, we present our answers and precise actions with regards to the points raised in your review.

#1 I greatly appreciated all the revision efforts of the author. The revised version demonstrates the sufficient and adequate actions taken by the authors to respond to the suggestions. Given that some of the requested data are not available and some requests were beyond the scope of the paper, the revised version has met the criteria for publication successfully. The authors also clarified the paper’s limitations as well as its broader implication/contribution to the field and academia. Again, I think highly of the authors’ efforts to bring this significant theme to the table for the on-going discussion of the roles of SEs in association with SDGs, starting with the Galician case.

We thank very much the reviewer for the positive comments about our study and also for the new revised version, which the reviewer considers that has met  the requirement for publication. We are very grateful for his/her former assistance and for this final appreciation.

# 2 How can be fostered SE from a subnational approach? ==> How can SEs be fostered from a subnational approach? (I am not sure whether this is appropriate correction. Please feel free to re-revise or re-edit it if my suggestion is not to the point)

Thank you for this suggestion. We have rewritten the sentence, and in the new version the question is as follows:

(2)      How can SE be fostered from a subnational approach? (pg. 3, line 85)

#5 Galician’s government has taking the first steps along a highly demanding path.==>  “has taken” or “has been taking”?

Thank you for this correction. We agree the first phrase was wrong, and we have changed it for this one:

Taking into account these recommendations and the results of our study, Galician’s government has taken the first steps along a highly demanding path. (pg. 15, line 528)

#6 Additionally, there are barely official data to stablish rigorous comparations between the evolution and location of SE entities -and more specifically, of cooperatives- and other kind of organizations.==> establish? Or make?

Thank you again. Following your suggestion, we changed the verb:

Additionally, there are barely official data to make rigorous comparations between the evolution and location of SE entities -and more specifically, of cooperatives- and other kind of organizations. This limitation prevents us to make solid comparations to other groups of entities (pg. 16, line 569)

In conclusion, we thank you again for your constructive review points and suggestions. We feel that our revised version covers all your points and trust that this point-by-point set of responses to all of your suggestions and comments responds to your detailed review.