Transformation of Nature Protection Institutions in the North Caucasus: From a State Monopoly of Governance to Multi-Actor Management

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The work is okay.

Author Response

In accordance with the reviewer's recommendation, we have supplemented the list of references

Reviewer 2 Report

This was an easy-to-read and interesting paper. The only errors I detected were some inappropriate hyphenation (especially in the Abstract), and perhaps a final read through should be done. There was also some strange formatting in the references. However, I found the paper to be rather descriptive and I failed to fully comprehend the significance of the paper. Can this be made more obvious? The discussion and conclusions seemed rather short. Surely more can be said. With only 37 references, the literature referred to was somewhat limited and potentially there could be more connection to the ample literature about the governance of protected areas, benefit sharing in protected areas, and how protected areas might get a social licence to operate.

Author Response

The authors are grateful for the very helpful advice on how to improve the work. We fixed some formatting and hyphenation errors. Then we moved on to substantive and principled remarks: relatively weak citations of literature and recommendations for the use of concepts related to governance of protected areas, benefit sharing in protected areas.

We tried to take them into account:

We have expanded the theoretical part by referring to the literature on the governance of protected areas and benefit sharing in protected areas.

We also tried to expand the discussion to use some ideas in the field of participation of the local population, the principles of mutually beneficial cooperation between the state and the local community. However, we understand that in order to fully exploit the potential of these concepts, we would have to deeply transform the methodology and, possibly, change the theoretical framework of the article.

Nevertheless, we completely agree with the reviewer that the data presented in the article can potentially serve for a deeper generalization.