Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

This paper discusses transboundary transitional waters, and their relation to potential conflict or cooperation. It is an original article, and makes an interesting novel contribution to the literature. I would however have two suggestions for the authors. 

1) Why the use of transitional waters? The hydropolitical literature tends to focus on transboundary waters; minor literature considers international waters. So it would be useful to add a paragraph in the introduction discussing the difference between these concepts, and the reasons behind the adoption of transitional waters for this paper. 

2) You write "Several investigations discuss the hydropolitical relationships in cross-border cooperation practices on transboundary river basin and adjacent TTW management considering various aspects of cross-border politics and political power center stage in water issues".

I would suggest adding also reference to the role of the broader political context for the analysis of hydropolitical relations and dynamics; read for instance and discuss the following chapter, which I think would be useful for the analysis and inclusion into your work: Mattia Grandi "Contexts matter: A hydropolitical analysis of Blue Nile and Yarmouk River basins"  - Social water studies in the Arab Region, 2015

Once these two aspects are addressed, I would be happy to review a revised version. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report (Previous Reviewer 2)

This paper addresses an emerging topic in an controversial area, it is well written and well structured, and figures are prepared neatly. Therefore, no comment.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)

Dear Authors,

I have read your paper titled "Transboundary transitional waters: arenas for cross-border cooperation or confrontation?" with great interest. First of all, I would like to acknowledge the efforts you have put into creating a global database, which is a commendable aspect of your study. It is a good study, and its strength lies in the creation of a global data inventory regarding Transboundary Transitional Waters (TTW).

However, while reading the paper, I felt that you presented very limited information from the global datasets. It is surprising that out of many influential variables, only one variable was found to influence the risk of confrontation in TTW. The conclusion that the risk of confrontation is closely correlated with the level of corruption in a more bellicose country sharing the transboundary transitional water body (ln 20-21) raises some questions.

It would be appropriate to validate such subjective claims through your previously published work on this subject (ln 128).

Additionally, I suggest considering a rephrasing of the two consecutive acronyms mentioned in ln 137 to enhance the clarity of the text.

Furthermore, in ln 196, it would be helpful to elaborate on the differences between trimming and Winsorization, as they are two distinct techniques used to handle extreme values in datasets.

Moreover, I found Figure 2 to be visually overwhelming and not easy to comprehend. I recommend exploring alternative presentation techniques that can effectively convey the information contained in the datasets.

Furthermore, it would be interesting if you could investigate moderation and mediation analyses to determine which variables moderate or mediate the risk of confrontation. Exploring under what conditions the confrontation risk can be avoided would provide valuable quantitative or qualitative insights for readers.

Overall, I appreciate the efforts and the valuable contribution of your study. Addressing the mentioned points and considering the suggested additions could further strengthen your paper and enhance its impact.

 

Thank you for considering my feedback, and I look forward to seeing the revised version of your paper.

There are some points where conjunction is required and article use is missing. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

It is clearer now 

Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)

Thanks for your responses and comments incorporation 

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I have read the paper with interest, reading about cooperation and conflict over transboundary and transitional waters. 

My comments to improve the paper while revising it are as follows. I would be happy to review a revised version to check on how these comments are incorporated.

 

1) often the authors mention "extensive academic literature has done XYZ" without actually mentioning or referencing such literature. For lines 64-74 on Russia-Ukraine I would suggest reading and including the papers:

Bildirici, Melike E., Sérgio Lousada, and Sema Yılmaz Genç. "Terrorism, Freshwater, and Environmental Pollution: Evidence of Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Iraq, Arab Republic of Egypt, Cameroon, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, Syrian Arab Republic, and Pakistan." Water 14.17 (2022): 2684.

Hussein, H. (2022). Russia is weaponizing water in its invasion of Ukraine. Nature, 603(7903), 793-793.

2) The paper would benefit from qualitative data such as interviews. Why those have not been included? Please better justify and convince me of your methods of data collection (and analysis).

3) Is cooperation always good? See the work of Mark Zeitoun, and of Clemens Messerschmidt, and of Jan Selby (cooperation as domination, and the case of the joint water committee). 

4) discussion and conclusion are wayyyy to short! Only 10 lines ish. This should be the core of your paper, where you discuss and tell the readers your analysis. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

-          It would be beneficial to have a two line conclusion in the abstract

-          It is important to separate study area from the introduction, and put Fig.1 there

-          Fig.1 have to be improved, Legend should append to the map. Here the legend falls below the caption! This applies for all figures

-          Table.1 “Source” column should be dropped. GIS data is not a source

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

 

Review of “Transboundary transional waters: arenas for cross-boundary cooperation or confrontation?” by Povilanskas and Razinkova-Baziukas

Major comments: This is a well-written and very good paper that merits publication after a few significant revisions. The discussion is outstanding. There are two parts of the paper that need some work. Table 1 contains a series of unreferenced sources for the various geographic locations. These sources need to contain references. Also, in the text the guiding principles need to be explained (e.g., winsorization, range of elative score values, etc.). In the methods section a subsection should be added to clearly define how the confrontation risk values were classified (is this from another work or how did you mathematically determine it?). Also, the scoring methodology needs to be explained that is used below Table 3.

Minor comments:

Line 11. After introducing the term “transboundary transitional water”, the authors should define this term because it could be confused with non-tidal surface water or groundwater.

Line 21. The high confrontation and no confrontational factors should be added to the text.

Line 51. What is “socioeconomic polities”?

Line 117. The verb has should be has.

Line 129. Define RF is its first use along with the abbreviation. Perhaps it would be best to spell out Russian Federation base on the fact the no other country is abbreviated.

Line 145. Add “the” before investigators.

Line 211. The first sentence should be explained-perhaps in the methods. What method was used to normalize the data and what is a “common scale”.

Line 292. Change had to has.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

General statement

The manuscript looks into confrontational risks between nation states that share a certain coastal region that the authors describe as transboundary transitional waters. The overall impetus of the manuscript is well focused and the topic is interesting, especially against the recent conflicts in Eastern Europe. I also like the idea of building this analysis on a broad range of quantitative indicators to measure the confrontational risks between nation states. However, the manuscript lacks important methodological information and a broad presentation of the data analysis. Furthermore, the discussion section is virtually non-existent.

Major Issues

·         The methodology of the study remains rather hidden behind a large table of indicators. It is not clear to me where certain data was obtained from as it only states, “GIS data” and no further references are given. Furthermore, the construction of the CCI is not clear to me. The authors state that it falls back on the Travel & Tourism Development Index, but how it was adapted from there with 5 thematic facets remains hidden. How did they come up with these topics and how did they decide which indicators should be listed within each of the facets. All of this requires more explanation.

·         In addition, it is unclear to me how they identified the TTW – did they map the entire coastlines worldwide or did they somehow make a pre-selection? If they conducted a full mapping, how was this done? Country by country? Are they sure they mapped “all” transboundary transitional waters on the planet? An overview map of all TTW identified and analyzed would help a lot!

·         The results section is good to read and interesting. But as the authors collected so much data and did some major analyses on this data, I would expect some data-plots that show how that data is distributed. This would make the paper a lot stronger as it now remains in a rather qualitative description of individual cases.

·         The discussion section is not a discussion at all! It misses everything that you would expect as a reader. There is no discussion of methodological advantages/disadvantages or potential improvements, there is no discussion of the major results against other ways of measuring confrontational risks between countries. It is hard to understand why the authors introduce the concept of “spin dictatorship” and how this helps at this point to reflect the results? Are all TTW with higher confrontational risks characterized by dictators? This needs massive improvements!

Minor Issues

·         Line 21: One more sentence may be of interest on your major conclusions as you close your abstract with a results component.

·         Lines 38-40: At this point we do not yet know about your methods and results, so why do you present insights in the introduction? Either you refer to another study or you have to put this insight into your results/discussion sections.

·         Line 52: The introduction talks a lot about TW systems in Europe and the current state of knowledge especially concerning the ecological/biodiversity aspects. But you only talk very little about the Emerald Growth Concept. Could you expand a bit on it and how/where it was used previously?

·         Lines 58-60: Again you present methodological information in the introduction. Here you should focus on providing arguments why you study TW systems and what the current state of knowledge is – not what you did in your study.

·         Lines 64-65: Please provide a reference for this “increased academic interest”.

·         Line 123: You may close your introduction with a brief paragraph on what your study actually tries to do or which research questions you answer. At this point, except from the Abstract, I have no idea what your study will actually do. The first paragraph in Material & Methods may be suitable to be transferred here.

·         Lines 135-141: Numbering the steps of the first stages makes them a bit more prominent. Maybe you could also number the steps of stage 2 as well? Would make it better to get an overview of all relevant steps and stages.

·         Lines 142-150: Ok, you used Google Earth to map TTW worldwide. That’s a pretty brief description of what you did. How did you identify those areas exactly. Did you click around all coastlines worldwide to find those TTW sites or did you use any prior dataset to narrow down the regions where you want to map? Is the database a comprehensive one or do you think there may be more TTW out there? How can you be sure?

·         Lines158-160: The CCI index follows the Travel & Tourism Development Index. But how did you adjust it? How did you come up with the 5 categories and the 25 indicators? You don’t mention any references from where you may have taken the overall indicator facets or at least ideas to construct the CCI.

·         Lines 168-174: These lines correspond to lines 135-141 word by word – please delete one paragraph.

·         Line 176: I think it’s 25 indicators in total and not 25 indicators per facet?

·         Lines 191-203: Could you please indicate the sources from where you obtained the geospatial data? It seems you collected a lot of items and it would be beneficial to list them here like you listed all the individual indicators.

·         Results: It’s good that you list the areas with highest confrontation risk and give some insights into two examples. But as you collected a lot of data and analyzed it, it would be great if you could give a more comprehensive overview on your data. What is the mean value for each facet, how is the distribution of the risk values – are more TTW on the lower or upper end. I would like to see more data analysis charts/plots to see how the data is distributed both the final index and the individual indicators/facets. This would help to understand the statistics behind – normally distributed, etc.

Author Response

Thank you for your review. The reply in the review package is as follows:

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I can see that the paper has been improved. My two other suggestions would be to rethink the framing on line 1059 of global south as this may sound Orientalistic (please read Orientalism by Edward Said).

the other suggestion is on line 166, to include reference to the publication in this journal on Sdg 6.5.2 on transboundary water cooperation (see the paper by Filippo Menga, Francesca Greco, and Hussein, published here in sustainability).

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your comments on the 2nd round. We have addressed your both remarks duly and revised the manuscript accordingly.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

General statement

First of all, I would like to thank the authors for their major effort on enhancing the quality of the manuscript and answering all my questions and comments. Again, I would like to point out that it seems to be a major work to map all TTW across the world and that’s a valuable database for further work. However, before accepting this manuscript for publication, the authors may have a look into the literature on how to build composite indicators. It would be great if they could confirm their composite indicator meets all relevant criteria.  

Major Issues

·         I appreciate the authors’ effort to look into their data from a statistical point of view to explore patterns of confrontational risk, e.g. via the PCA analysis. The general problem with “composite indicators” is that it is not always valuable to increase the number of indicators as they may not necessarily enhance the actual performance of the composite. This was termed as “indicator rich but information poor”. I would recommend that the authors critically analyze their set of indicators again to see if multicollinearity is present among the independent variables. Because the major goal must be to only include those indicators, that are statistically independent from one another. If some are not, they can be left out as they do not provide additional information. A PCA analysis is one way of doing this. So, I wonder if the PCA analysis would actually indicate, if the confrontational risk index can be computed by less indicators as some of the 25 indicators are actually correlated. I recommend to take a look at the OECD handbook on how to construct composite indicators (https://www.oecd.org/sdd/42495745.pdf) to check, if all relevant steps and recommendations were met.

·         Grammar and spell check required as track changes has obviously destroyed a lot of sentences (red replacements of parts of the sentences did obviously not delete the original “black” part of the sentence).

Minor Issues

·         Abstract: I think the abstract could take up the information that you created a comprehensive inventory of TTW globally instead of mentioning the Travel & Tourism Development Index and giving detailed methodological hints (e.g. “value is subtracted from the average of the other four values”). Good that you include a conclusion sentence, but actually that’s not a good one.

·         Lines 43-45: You indicated that you transferred this into the results section but it still appears here. I would not mention this aspect here in the introduction as this is your result!

·         Lines 46-18: Duplicate to lines 41-43.

·         Lines 54-56: Importance of TW for human civilizations may be strengthened with a reference.

·         Lines 63-67: Again these are results and should not appear in the introduction. You may focus more on the scientific literature in the introduction and not so much on your own results.

·         Figure 1: Appears twice, once in the introduction and again in the methods section. I would delete the one in the introduction.

·         Lines 136-138: These are your results, should not be part of the introduction.

·         Lines 248-254: This information does not help a lot, I would suggest to delete this one and put all source information on which geodata you used into the supplementary material, as it would probably to much for the table to describe all sources. However, for me it would be very interesting and necessary to clearly indicate from which source each indicator got its data -> so please put it into the supplementary material.

·         Lines 255-262: Nearly duplicate with lines 264-269.

·         Lines 301-302: I don’t know how the “rugged coastline” of Europe should be a reason for a lower share of TW.

·         Table 2: It’s great work that you conducted in mapping all these TTW around the world. However, I doubt that a table in the main text is the best way to present your results. I’d suggest to put this table into the supplementary material or (and this would be my favorite) create a map with points that indicate the locations of the TTW.

·         Figure 2: Thanks for including this figure, it’s a good way of showing the distribution of among major world regions.

Author Response

Thank you for your review. The reply in the review package is as follows:

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

Looks fine 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

General statement

Thanks for incorporating your changes so quickly and for answering my questions. I think up to here, the manuscript improved significantly and what now remains is a more thorough presentation of the statistical foundation of your study as I indicate in my comments below.

Major Issues

·         Thanks for considering the OECD handbook. I see that you included a paragraph in the methods section in which you describe that you considered the principles in constructing the composite indicator. However, I would be happy if you would provide a correlation plot of all variables so that the readers can see if collinearity was really excluded from the dataset. If you don’t want to include a plot in the manuscript, you may provide the reviewers this information for us to see that the variables do not correlate with one another.

·         I appreciate that the authors included a statistical analysis of their results. Actually, they present a PCA analysis in the results section but they do not describe this as a method in their methods section. I’d suggest that they include a section on “statistical analysis” in their method section in which they describe why they perform a PCA with what aim and with what variables (as the authors only include the confrontational risk variable, the corruption perception variable, GDP and continent).

Minor Issues

·         Table 2: Thanks for answering my question on why you included your inventory as a table. In the end, it’s up to you and the editors how you present your rich database but from my point of view, I cannot understand why there should be resolution problems or any copyright issues – using a GIS software you can easily plot a world map and put some points on it… anyway, your decision.

·         Figure 4: Please add labels to the axis, the reader can’t see which variable is plotted on which axis.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx