Is Public Participation Weak Environmental Regulation? Experience from China’s Environmental Public Interest Litigation Pilots

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper clearly demonstrates that EPIL policies reduce urban pollution emissions in those cities. The research methods and data analysis appear to be sound.  As such, it is a valuable contribution.

A key weakness of the paper is the failure to quantify or estimate the amount of litigation in both EPIL and non-EPIL cities.  The ability to correlate environmental improvements with the amount of litigation would also help to corroborate the findings about the limited success of EPIL to reduce pollution in resource-based, underdeveloped, or small-sale cities.  While acquiring such data may be difficult and beyond the scope of this paper, the topic should be discussed.

The assumption in the introduction that EPIL can "overcome conflicts of interest" and promotes "consensus-building for resolving environmental conflicts" seems counter-intuitive, and is not demonstrated by the methods or data in this paper.  Litigation occurs when negotiation and consensus building have failed, and the losing side in litigation is unlikely to suddenly become willing to promote collaboration.  Some additional analysis of cases whereby litigation increases, rather than resolves, environmental conflicts would strengthen the paper. An alternative mechanism is that litigation enhances the power of the public to overcome the conflicts of interest of government officials and industrial developers interested in promoting economic development.  In any event, since the methods do not address the underlying motivations, I recommend that the present these as alternative hypotheses, rather than assumptions.

 Finally, the data do not distinguish whether pollution was reduced due to pollution control investments induced by EPIL, versus reductions associated with the most polluting enterprises moving disproportionately to cities or rural areas without EPIL. While that cannot be resolved with these data, the discussion should address this alternative mechanism, and perhaps suggest additional research to evaluate this.

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Editorial suggestions:

Line 28, and throughout.  In most cases, if citations are numbered, the author, year can be omitted.

Lines 53-57.  Unclear, run-on sentence.  Consider omitting or re-writing the clause: "which means the quality of public participation in environmental impact assessment (EIA) affected by a legal framework (Khosravi et al., 2019; Kolhoff et al., 2013)[12, 13]." as this clause does not flow from the rest of the sentence.

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The introduction is taking number "0" it should be number "1". and all section numbers should be updated.

in the introduction, the author highlighted the advantage of public involvement; however involving public may be associated with some disadvantages because of lack of scientific background or bias. many studies there is a significant difference between the actual risk and perceived risk.

in line 75 the author repeated the results about the paper however this should not be included in the introduction.

The author wrote in line 82: the contribution of this paper to the literature review is..... I think this should be a separate section with a literature review title.

referencing style should be rechecked to comply with the journal reference style. the author used both numbered and intext citation which is not in alignment with the journal.

table 3 header should be revisited and clarified for column 1, 2,3 and 4.

calculation of water quality index, air quality index should be explained better.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I reviewed with interest this manuscript, which looks at China's environmental public interest litigation (EPIL) pilot as a quasi-natural experiment, and utilizes a causal inference approach (difference in difference modeling) to explore the impact of China's EPIL pilot policy on urban environmental quality. There is no doubt that this is a well-documented and well-written paper on environmental economics, but I think it should be revised as follows before it is published:

 

(1) L25-L113, the introduction is slightly confusing, please separate the introduction from the literature review and present the literature review as a separate section of the paper.

(2) L150-L213, Theoretical Assumptions section, please add a theoretical analysis framework diagram to show more clearly the mechanism of action and pathway of EPIL's impact on urban environmental quality.

(3) L269, Table 1, the text lacks descriptive notes on some of the variables in Table 1, such as wind , precipitation, and daylight.

(4) L270-L275, missing descriptions of the sources of some of the variables in Table 2, e.g., wind, precipitation, daylight, etc.

(5) L506-L523, the policy recommendations section does not closely follow the findings of the thesis and lacks relevance.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf