Public Participation and the Effect of Environmental Governance in China: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This is an interesting study and could be accepted after addressing the following issues.
1. The study should be reported according to PRISMA 2020, so the author should revise the text with the help of PRISMA 2020. Ref: PMID: 33782057.
2. Some references were too old; I suggest the author added some latest references.
3. The limitation of the study did not report clearly. Please see some meta-analysis, such as: PMID: 36415154.
4. All included studies should be cited in the text, Chinese language should be removed in the table.
Author Response
Thanks for the suggestions.
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.doc
Reviewer 2 Report
This is an interesting and understudied research question. A stronger theoretical framing is needed. One suggestion might be to build of the institutional collective action framework (Policy Studies Journal 2013). Also the empirical work of Hongtao Yi on environmental governance in China is relevant, particularly his 2018 article in public administration review.
Author Response
Thanks for the suggestions.
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
The article "Public participation and the effect of environmental governance in China: A meta-analysis" deals with an issue of great current interest. Works such as this one are very necessary, as they help to address and better understand the greater or lesser degree of public participation in environmental governance. This knowledge is a major issue, especially in a context in which environmental problems and their negative effects are becoming more and more acute on a planetary scale, increasing people's concerns about this situation. In these circumstances, China is no exception, as it is a country with serious environmental problems, largely related to its very rapid, intense and spectacular process of economic growth. In this regard, the authors of this article show how the authorities have taken action in this country, so that China "has begun to rethink its environmental governance systems and view public participation as the key to solving environmental problems due to the shortcomings of the government and enterprises".
On the one hand, the article uses precise language and is well written and well-structured in its reasoning, making it easy to read. On the other hand, the methodology is appropriate for the type of research that has been done. For all these reasons, the work could be published in a Journal such as Sustainability. However, before that, the authors should make some improvements to their work. These amendments are detailed below:
1) In the Introduction some more comments about the problem of environmental governance are missing, trying at least to mention how this problem is approached in the context of other countries in the world. It is also important to mention some additional authors and world bibliographical-theoretical references about the subject under study in this manuscript.
2) In some part of the manuscript, where the authors consider it more convenient, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) should be taken into account. Thus, they should assess (or at least make a slight mention of) the extent to which the three regions of China's territory considered in this paper are more or less far from achieving such goals.
3) The authors are encouraged to conduct interviews, both with representatives of the authorities and with people from civil society, in future research. For this work, I do not consider it appropriate to ask the authors to do these interviews now, which would be as much as asking them to do another work different from the one already done. However, if previous interviews such as those I have mentioned have already been carried out by other authors and their results have been published, it would be very appropriate for the authors to take these results into account and to introduce in their manuscript, where they consider it more convenient, at least some comments on it.
4) Not only should a section be devoted to the "Limitations and Future Research" addressed in point 7, which is by the way too brief, but perhaps the authors should think about writing some additional paragraphs, in which they make recommendations that could serve as guidelines for the makers of public policies on the environment. Similarly, some recommendations could be made on how to promote further development of public awareness about the need for involvement in environmental governance.
5) On page 6 there is an item written in Chinese without translation into English.
I leave it up to the authors to decide how they decide to implement the above suggestions, which are basically constructive and are intended to help them improve their work.
Author Response
Thanks for the suggestions.
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
Revisions have improved this manuscript.
