Analysing Irrigation Farmers’ Preferences for Local Governance Using a Discrete Choice Experiment in India and Pakistan

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I read the manuscript with interest. Here are my comments and suggestions on how to improve it:

1) Explain why these two case studies. More on methodology and justification of the research design

2) More on Policentryc governance (see the work of Andreas Thiel among others).

3) You say that no previous work has been done on participatory approaches with farmers to understand their behaviour towards water tariffs. Look at this work:
Ibele, B., Sandri, S., & Zikos, D. (2017). Endogenous versus exogenous rules in water management: An experimental cross-country comparison. Mediterranean Politics, 22(4), 504-536

4) Introduction: Read and reference also the case of Jordan in particular the Water Users Associations in Jordan Valley and of the Highlands Water Forum (GIZ). See for instance: 

Salman, A., Al-Karablieh, E., Regner, H. J., Wolff, H. P., & Haddadin, M. (2008). Participatory irrigation water management in the Jordan Valley. Water Policy, 10(4), 305-322.

Mustafa, D., Altz-Stamm, A., & Scott, L. M. (2016). Water user associations and the politics of water in Jordan. World Development, 79, 164-176.

5) Line 24: read and include also political challenges of tariffs collection: 

Hussein, H. (2018). Tomatoes, tribes, bananas, and businessmen: An analysis of the shadow state and of the politics of water in Jordan. Environmental Science & Policy, 84, 170-176.

6) line 30: "doesn't": avoid contractions in Academic English 

7) line 46: "were"... you mean "where"? 

Author Response

Thank you for the feedback. Please find attached our response and we have included a copy of the manuscript with track changes activated.

 

Regards

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper is focused on an interesting topic such as local irrigation water management, full within the scope of mdpi-Water. Moreover, the approach followed, using choice experiments to assess irrigator preferences, is innovative and yields valuable results. All these facts make this reviewer willing to accept this paper for publication. However, some improvements are needed and others are suggested in order to improve the quality of the manuscript.

IMPROVEMENTS NEEDED

1. A brief description of irrigation agriculture (crops, irrigation technologies, etc.) and the population of irrigation farmers in the four case studies considered are worth to be included in Section 2 in order to properly frame the empirical research work implemented.
2. The choice experiment approach is usually used in the literature as a valuation technique, including a monetary attribute to estimate trade-off with the rest of the attributes. However, this is not the case in this paper, where choice modeling is just implemented to assess irrigators’ preferences over several local irrigation water management options. This fact should be explicitly commented in the manuscript, justifying why no monetary attribute measuring willingness to pay (or accept) has been considered.
3. When the results are explained, it is not clear for the readers which are the status quo in each case study considered, leading to misunderstanding the estimations achieved. Thus, a more careful explanation of the results obtained considering the current situation in each case study area is requested.
4. The paper does not follow the quotation method required for references in all papers published in mdpi journals. Please, revise the guidelines provided for authors in this sense, and make the changes needed.

IMPROVEMENTS SUGGESTED

1. As shown in Figs 2 and 3, the choice cards included a note stating “Selecting option 1 means that you prefer the current situation to the other options”. Does this mean that option 1 was the same in all choice cards used in the same province? This fact should be clarified.
2. In Section 6 a new table containing the main variables describing the samples drawn are worth to be included.
3. To save space, it is suggested to combine current tables 6 and 7 (India) in a single table. The same applies to tables 8 and 9 (Pakistan), tables 11 and 12 (India), and tables 13 and 14 (Pakistan).

OTHER MINOR COMMENTS

1. Some references (e.g., McFadden 1986, Scarpa and Rose 2008, Gandhi et al. 2020, Ahmed et al. 2020) are quoted in the text, but they are not included in the references section.
2. In Table 5 some ‘n’ are missing.

Author Response

Thank you for the feedback. Please find attached our response and we have included a copy of the manuscript with track changes activated.

 

Regards

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I can see improvements in the manuscript. 

The only thing missing, as previously suggested (and rebutted by the authors), is the inclusion of the aspect of political economy. The authors believed that the reference I suggested titled "Tomatoes, tribes, bananas, and businessmen: An analysis of the shadow state and of the politics of water in Jordan" should not be included as it reference to Jordan. My suggestion, therefore, is to include it on line 52 after:

"For example, Salman et al. [9] note that the relative success of participatory irrigation in Jordan was partly related to the willingness of stakeholders to make adjustments in the course of implementation."

The authors should include "Also from the case of Jordan, recent literature shows the necessity of considering the political economy when evaluating policy options for reforming the water sector able to ensure implementation"

The authors could also add reference here of Dr. Valerie Yorke and Prof. Martin Keulertz on the topic, in addition to the one on "Tomatoes, tribes, bananas".

 

Hope this helps.

Author Response

Thank you again for suggesting that we add additional references to emphasize the political dimensions of the problem.

We note that the reviewer originally requested that we “read and include also political challenges of tariffs collection”. Following the first review we sought to highlight the general issues of politics by inserting additional commentary in the introductory paragraph. Following the second review we accept that additional citations would help. Accordingly, we have added citations and commentary that relate to the political challenges as they apply in south Asia (now citations [4], [5] and [6].

We appreciate the contribution made by Hussein (2018) but observe that the author himself notes that “ This analysis will serve policy makers and water professionals to better understand how to navigate the complex Jordanian water sector”. Accordingly, we are reluctant to take Hussein’s (2018) contribution out of context by using it in our paper.

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks for sending me this revised version. Unfortunately, I can see that there is still work to be done before it reaches the quality level for publication. In particular, the major issues that still need to be solved are:

 

• CONTEXT: the context section still does not provide the insights needed to unfold the nuances and provide the reader with the broader context needed to understand the relevance of the issue in the four cases considered. Why is it important? Why does it matter? It seems it was written by external people not very familiar with the areas. Did the team include local experts, or is it rather a report written by non-pakistani and not indian scholars? If so, please think of ways to fill these evident gaps.
• METHODOLOGY: what research approach design did you adopt? Why? This is currently not convincing and not well justified. I would suggest the authors to go back to the basis of research methodology, maybe looking at the Bryant book on Social Research Methodology might help. I need to know and be convinced of the Research Design, and link it directly with the guiding Research Question (which has to be mentioned in the Introduction!), informing the methodology section. 
• METHODS: You write in line 227: "several face to face interviews"; I need to know how many, how they were distributed across the case study, how were the participants selected, through which method, why were they the relevant people, and also include the list of questions you have asked as an Annex. Without this, the data are not really convincing. 
• ETHICS: how did the role of interpreters impact the results? How did the impact of white researchers or international researchers involved in the study impact how you understood the problem, how you framed it, and how you were perceived while conducting the study? More on positionality is needed, which is a problem many white Western colleagues often have when coming to India. This needs to be taken seriously by scholars.
• COMPARISON: if the reference on "Tomatoes" in Jordan is not relevant to the authors, they may prefer to look at the work of the European scholars Martin Keulertz (German) and Valerie Yorke (British) on the same topic of Hussain. 

Author Response

We have provided a detailed response to each point in the attached document.

Thank you

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf