Policy Analysis of Environmental Governance in the Bohai Rim Region (2001–2021)—A Perspective Based on the Vertical Synergy of Policies
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsDear authors
Following the review of you paper, there are some issues that you need to considered.
1. Abstract
*The information from 294/296 should be here.
2. Introduction:
*What is the central question?
*How is the paper structured?
*what was the methodology?
*The references are not aligned with the guidelines
*What is its contribution to science? Why the study is relevant?
3. Literature review
*In the conclusion: Can you cite the authors that support those claims.
4. Mehtod
*Its was important to make a table which you mentioned the studies related to each province and the topic of study.
*Should add (Themes): Data collection, variables and explain
*It lacks mathematical information:
*6.4. You should change the title is confusing (Limitations and Future research)
*What are the hypothesis, they are related to the literature? Should be below the each topic of the literature
*Figure 1 needs to be labeled
*It is important to add some information regarding the framework.
Author Response
Dear reviewer, we appreciate for your precious time in reviewing our paper and providing valuable comments. It was your valuable and insightful comments that led to possible improvements in the current version. The authors have carefully considered the comments and tried our best to address every one of them. We hope the manuscript after careful revisions meet your high standards. The authors welcome further constructive comments if any.
Comment 1.1. Abstract *The information from 294/296 should be here.
Response 1. we add "A comprehensive text database was established to facilitate analysis with 122 pieces of Bohai sea environmental governance policies including 24 from the central government, 32 from Shandong Province, 35 from Liaoning Province, 16 from Tianjin Municipality, and 15 from Hebei Province. " in abstract.
comment 2. 2. Introduction:
*What is the central question?
*How is the paper structured?
*what was the methodology?
*The references are not aligned with the guidelines
*What is its contribution to science? Why the study is relevant?
Response 2. On the section of introduction, we add more specific information about these suggestions from line 82-line 111
Comment 3: Literature review *In the conclusion: Can you cite the authors that support those claims.
Response 3. we add these two references to support the literature review conclusion.
- Yao, C., Sun, M. and Liu, L. (2023) ‘Evaluation of policy synergy in coastal ocean pollution prevention and control: The case from China’, Frontiers in Marine Science.
- Pan, F., Cheng, L. and Wang, L. (2023) ‘Selection and application of Bohai Sea environmental governance policy instruments: A quantitative analysis based on policy text (1996–2022)’, Sustainability, 15, p. 13454.
Comment 4.Mehtod *Its was important to make a table which you mentioned the studies related to each province and the topic of study. *Should add (Themes): Data collection, variables and explain *It lacks mathematical information:
Response 4. Thank you for pointing out these problems. The authors are sorry for didn't display these information clearly, we add a theme of data collection, and due to the logic of expression, the mathematical information is expressed in section 4. results.
Comment 5.*6.4. You should change the title is confusing (Limitations and Future research)
*What are the hypothesis, they are related to the literature? Should be below the each topic of the literature
*Figure 1 needs to be labeled
*It is important to add some information regarding the framework.
Response 5. The authors agree with the reviewer that these mistakes should be revised and we revise them as your suggestions.
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe manuscript titled "Policy Analysis of Environment Governance in the Bohai Sea-a Perspective Based on Vertical Synergy of Policies" aims to examine the effectiveness of the formulation and implementation of environmental protection and governance policies in the Bohai Sea. However, there are some places should be polished.
- Why the general scoring criteria for subject synergy is 5 to 1, while objective synergy and instrument synergy are only 5, 3,1,0?
- How do you judge the vertical synergy policies?
- Where and how many data sources were collected?
- Why did the cities not include Beijing?
- In Table 1, the authors should list the references for these three policies.
- For the formula throughout the manuscript, should use MathType
- The name and the caption of Figure 1 should be present under the figure.
- The data sources websites should be given out clearly.
- In Line 344, why the x1, x2 and x3 take these numbers or values?
- update the literature or references.
Author Response
Dear reviewer.
We are very grateful for your constructive comments and suggestions for our manuscript (ID:3556721_).Your comments are very valuable and helpful for improving our manuscript. In the following, the responses to all the comments are provided one by one. We have tried our best to make all the revisions clear, and we hope that the revised manuscript can satisfy the requirements for publication.The main revisions in the new manuscript are：
Comment1. Why the general scoring criteria for subject synergy is 5 to 1, while objective synergy and instrument synergy are only 5, 3,1,0?
Response 1. we are sorry for this careless mistakes, according to your suggestions, we re-adjust the criteria of score, all the criteria are 5 to 1, and according to the primary score, we revised the data of the whole article. Now it is more scientific.
comment2. How do you judge the vertical synergy policies?
response2. this
comment 3.How do you judge the vertical synergy policies?
response 3. this information is shown in 3.5 data collection.
Comment 4.Why did the cities not include Beijing?
Response 4. we choose the Bohai rim region including these 4 provinces as our analyze subject, the main reason Beijing is not Bohai coastal city and with no coastline and wetland, so it could not be evaluated.
Comment 5 and 6, In Table 1, the authors should list the references for these three policies.
For the formula throughout the manuscript, should use MathType
Response 5 and 6. We agree with this suggestion and revise it. plz see table 1.
Comment7The name and the caption of Figure 1 should be present under the figure.
Response 7. We agree with this suggestion and revise it. plz see figure 1 .
Comment 8 The data sources websites should be given out clearly.
Response 8 we add these websites as the foot note to given out clearly.
Comment 9 In Line 344, why the x1, x2 and x3 take these numbers or values?
Response 9 we added the caculation process to make it more clear. plz see line 285-342.
Comment 10 update the literature or references.
Response 10 we agree with your suggestion and revised the references.
Thanks to the professional comments again that point out the above problems. The authors hope these explanations would answer your doubts.
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe authors present a very interesting qualitative analysis by comparing governmental planned environmental policy endeavors with actual outcomes. While the analysis not only provides an approach rarely see in the literature, it also provides readers with interesting insights on the researched area. Nevertheless, some issue persist that need to be fixed. I will go through them in more or less chronological order with two general comments at the end.
- There is an empty unrequired space in line 55.
- There is information missing from the introduction what the actual objective of the article is. While this answer is given in the later part of the article, the introduction leaves the reader wondering what is the objective of the article, why are the authors researching it and how will they go about it.
- The citations in section 2 are not fully formated correctly.
- Regarding the literature review, the authors do not answer the question whether comparable studies exist on other areas, i.e., with similar objectives or employing a similar methodology. At least some related literature on "martime" or "restoring policies" should exist that fits the scope of the article and should be referenced.
- Lines 179 ff.: Please realize the enumeration as a standard listing following the official format.
- Why are these evaluation criteria chosen? The authors at them being taken from the literature. Are there additional or alternative measures which might have been used? Which of those were rejected and why?
- How do the scores in Table 2 result? Why is it first a scale 1-5 and then a scole 0-5 without the inbetween values 2 and 4? The score should be made more consistent. Additionally, please reformat the table to make it more readable.
- The note to Table 1 suggests that the reported scores are averages, but does not, in any clear way, indicate the average of what is calculated. The last part of the sentence is even more convoluted. Please rephrase this data. Ideally illustrate it with an exemple.
- The formating in lines 205-208 is off.
- How are the three scoring processes carried out? Especially where is the difference between pre-scoring and preliminary scoring? How are the experts for the expert scoring selected, i.e., who are the experts and how many are there? How are the weights determined, is it via the entropy weight method detailed later?
- Lines 230-236 do not make it clear on which kind of data (synergy scores, comprehensive score) the entropy weight method is applied.
- Line 237 talks about some matrix B. What and where is it?
- The figure in line 265 lacks a caption, is inconsistently formated and has a spelling error. Why are now the functional zones used? Better introduce this level of detail, which is used throughout the whole analyis, earlier in the article.
- A summary of the results of section 4.2 to 4.4 in the form of a spiderweb chart may help the comparison of the four areas significantly.
- In addition to the achievement rate which is relative to set goals, a second achievement rate relative to overall restorable/or existing wetland area may be considered. The same holds for the coastline part.
- Since you refer to Pearson correlation in the test of correlation it needs to be assured that the data in the small sample case approximately follows a normal distribution. Spearman correlation, i.e., rank correlation may be better suited in your case, where sample size, normal distribution and even the metric scale of the data might be questionable. Please report as well the correlation coefficient to be able to evaluate the strength of the correlation.
- I think a better title for section 6.4 would be "Limitations and Outlook"
- The data availability statement etc. seems to be missing.
- Table headings have their numbering format wrong.
- While the article in retrospect is well understandable, some smaller changes would make it easy to understand the next step and whether some information, e.g., the weighting scheme, are missing or will be introduced later on in the article.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Thank you for your kind suggestion.
The paper has been revised carefully and thoroughly according to the comments from the reviewers. Your comments are very valuable and helpful for improving our manuscript. In the following, the responses to all the comments are provided one by one. We have tried our best to make all the revisions clear, and we hope that the revised manuscript can satisfy the requirements for publication.The main revisions in the new manuscript are：
Comment 1: There is an empty unrequired space in line 55.
- There is information missing from the introduction what the actual objective of the article is. While this answer is given in the later part of the article, the introduction leaves the reader wondering what is the objective of the article, why are the authors researching it and how will they go about it.
Response1:we agree with this and deleted the line 55, at the same time add information in introduction, plz see line 83-111.
Comment 2: The citations in section 2 are not fully formated correctly.
- Regarding the literature review, the authors do not answer the question whether comparable studies exist on other areas, i.e., with similar objectives or employing a similar methodology. At least some related literature on "martime" or "restoring policies" should exist that fits the scope of the article and should be referenced.
Response2: we revised the formatting of this article while there are still some formatting problems we could not solve, we gonna ask the kind help from the editor. And the literature is refined and added literature related with "martime" or "restoring policies" . plz see line 192-205
Comment 3: Why are these evaluation criteria chosen? The authors at them being taken from the literature. Are there additional or alternative measures which might have been used? Which of those were rejected and why?
Response3: we added the literature as evidence for the criteria chosen. Plz see table 1
Comment 4: How do the scores in Table 2 result? Why is it first a scale 1-5 and then a scole 0-5 without the inbetween values 2 and 4? The score should be made more consistent. Additionally, please reformat the table to make it more readable.
Response4: we are sorry for this careless mistakes, according to your suggestions, we re-adjust the criteria of score, all the criteria are 5 to 1, and according to the primary score, we revised the data of the whole article. Now it is more scientific.
Comment 5: The note to Table 1 suggests that the reported scores are averages, but does not, in any clear way, indicate the average of what is calculated. The last part of the sentence is even more convoluted. Please rephrase this data. Ideally illustrate it with an exemple.
How are the three scoring processes carried out? Especially where is the difference between pre-scoring and preliminary scoring? How are the experts for the expert scoring selected, i.e., who are the experts and how many are there? How are the weights determined, is it via the entropy weight method detailed later?
Response5: we add the score process information according to your kind advice, plz see table 3.
Comment 6: Line 237 talks about some matrix B. What and where is it?
Response6: matrix B is a calculating process of the weight method for 122 policies, however, it is too large to be in the text, so we did not add it.
Comment 7: Lines 230-236 do not make it clear on which kind of data (synergy scores, comprehensive score) the entropy weight method is applied.
Response7: we revise it, they are synergy scores.
Comment 8: A summary of the results of section 4.2 to 4.4 in the form of a spiderweb chart may help the comparison of the four areas significantly.
Response8: according to your kind suggestions, we design a spiderweb chart to show the data clearly.
Comment 9: In addition to the achievement rate which is relative to set goals, a second achievement rate relative to overall restorable/or existing wetland area may be considered. The same holds for the coastline part.
Response9: this is really a valuable suggestion, we add the restoration rate as an evaluation index, plz see 5.2
Comment 10: Since you refer to Pearson correlation in the test of correlation it needs to be assured that the data in the small sample case approximately follows a normal distribution. Spearman correlation, i.e., rank correlation may be better suited in your case, where sample size, normal distribution and even the metric scale of the data might be questionable. Please report as well the correlation coefficient to be able to evaluate the strength of the correlation.
Response10: as you mentioned, our data is less than 30, so we delete the test of correlation, utilize other evaluation method, plz see 5.2
Comment 11. I think a better title for section 6.4 would be "Limitations and Outlook"
- The data availability statement etc. seems to be missing.
- Table headings have their numbering format wrong.
Response10: we agree and solved these mistakes.
Thanks to the professional comments again that point out the above problems. The authors hope these explanations would answer your doubts.
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsPlease reduce/resume the abstract to 200 words
Author Response
Comment: Please reduce/resume the abstract to 200 words
Respond: Tank you for pointing out this, we resumed our abstract with 200 words to keep it short and to the point as your suggestion.
Thanks to the professional comments again that point out the above problems. The authors hope these explanations would answer your doubts.
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe authors suitably addressed all issues raised in the first review round.
Author Response
Dear reviewer, we appreciate for your precious time in reviewing our paper and providing valuable comments. It was your valuable and insightful comments that led to possible improvements in the current version.
