Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper presents a  system to evaluate the contributions of Citizens Initiatives as a questionnaire composed of 33 indicators distributed in three blocks: social cohesion, urban metabolism and transformation potential.  

Positive aspects

+ The proposal is promising to support citizens initiatives evaluation;

+ 30 initiatives in Spain were evaluated in two case studies.  

Negative aspects

- Contributions discussion. The background section lacks a comparative analysis about what differentiates this initiative from related works.

- Figures description. Many figures are presented, but they are poorly explained in the text, making their understanding hard and time consuming.  

Questions to authors

? What are the limitations of your proposal?

? There are any threats to the validity of the performed evaluation? Any bias to be considered?

? Cultural aspects could impact the evaluation system usage? For instance, initiatives from different countries?  

Other Comments:

- Review English, since some typos and grammar issues were found.

- Methods section. Please, provide more information about each step, such as decisions made, protocols, for instance, in Step 2 how criteria were chosen? how to infer which were most relevant?

- Improve figures explanation by adding some examples in the text that describes them. For example, see in Section 5.1.1 the text that presents Figures 4, 5 and 6 "As can be seen, some of the indicators of the CI evaluation system contribute to the improvement ...". Present at least one indicator as an example of your argument. Another example is Figure 9, where the text should be improved to present and explain the steps in the workflow.

- Consider to improve the Figure 9 to present more clearly the Who and Time information, since they are relevant aspects in the proposed workflow and are missed in the text description.

- Case Study. Improve the explanation about how the evaluation was performed. For example, how those 5 initiatives were chosen? how the evaluation was performed? who were the representatives in each one? how many time were consumed in each step? (following your Figure 9 workflow). About results, the figures with color meaning circles are hard to read and to understand the impact of each initiative. Improved text description could support that.

- Section 4.3 and results section. The terms "core" and "basic" are used in different parts of the text. They have the same meaning? I suggest to use a single term avoiding ambiguity. Idem for terms "supplementary" and "complementary". - Improve the quality of Figure 16.

- Section 5.2 :: "we realised that we had a very extensive set of questions that lasted for a long period of time" --> how long? This was observed in all blocks or in a particular one?

- Section 5.3. Too many figures and too little discussion and details. It looks like a research report to me, not as a scientific discussion paper. I suggest rewriting and reorganizing this section.

Author Response

Consulte el archivo adjunto.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The subject of the article is current and of great scientific interest. It is adapted to the theme of the "Sustainability" Journal.

It is an in-depth research in which theoretical-methodological aspects occupy an important place, which also recommends the article for publication.

However, the authors should better consider how their research can be applied to other urban systems in countries with different socio-economic particularities. This can be more clearly expressed in a few sentences in the discussion section or in the conclusions.

The structure of the article should also be reconsidered. It seems that the article was cut from a larger study without a sufficiently correct and in-depth analysis. For example, after section 4.2. follows 5.1.1. then 4.3...! The case study must be nominated in the title of section 5. Section 5.1.6. "Results" should be included in section 6, which should be renamed "Results and Discussions" and which in its current form is insufficiently developed in relation to its importance in the study.

The bibliography, which abounds in works about Spain, should be expanded by adding more works with similar topics applied to other countries, at least from the EU area ("Sustainability" Journal a journal with international circulation!).

Also, the summary is very short compared to the considerable length of the study (35 pages).

In conclusion, I recommend that the article be published, but I believe that some corrections are necessary to make it more connected with the international scientific literature on the subject. Some corrections regarding the structure and form of the work are also necessary.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I would like to thank the authors for their hard work on revising the paper and providing explanations on posed questions. Specially in the methodology section, I was pleased to read new information about the study, and the limitations / bias observed by the authors.

However, I still have issues regarding how the study results are presented and discussed. I think this version is improved regarding the previous one, but I still have the feeling of reading a project report instead of a scientific research paper, when I'm presented to results and discussions.

Author Response

Please see the attachment,

Best regards,

Fanny

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The article can be published. Authors can improve the bibliography and citations.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Best regards,

Fanny

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

I appreciate authors work on paper revision and questions explanations, particularly in the results and discussion issues.

I believe the current version has improvements and the paper can be published in its current form.