Stakeholders’ Perceptions on the Formulation of Climate Change Adaptation Policy and Governance: A Case of the Water Sector in the Raymond Mhlaba and Ngqushwa Local Municipalities, South Africa

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The paper contains too few information for being published in its present form.

Table 2 on page 8 illustrates that water scarcity statistically coincides with the gender, with occupation and with education. The authors write about causal relationships, but from the present outline of this Table is not easy to understand, how the significant khi² values could have been calculated. Table 4 on page 16 could also be useful after similar visual correction.

Table 3 on page 14, listing the adaptation actions by the various organizations and key persons concerning water scarcity is also useful for the readers.

At the same time, Figs 2-5 do not contain useful information for the readers.

Some more remarks are seen in the attached file.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

Thank you very much for your comments on the manuscript. 

Kindly find the attached file for detailed explanation on the corrections

Thank you

Sincerely

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for the opportunity to review this paper. I have a number of concerns about the paper in its current form, and I outline these below.

The paper would benefit form a review to improve clarity, particularly for an international audience. The relationship between the relative jurisdictions is not well articulated, which makes understanding the implementation of the method difficult - why those villages, why the ongoing references to AMD when the cases relate to the smaller municipalities etc?  

The paper would also benefit from a review to remove repetition.   

The paper would benefit from additional evidence to support assertions - this includes everything from assertions regarding frequent droughts (where is the evidence) through to assertions made as part of the findings. For example in section 3.2 last para...

"Hence, most of these households depend on unsafe and unclean water because of their inability to find alternative ways,...."  This is unsupported speculation. 

Clarity is also required with respect to the method.  For instance the authors identified a target population of 300 and sent out 300 surveys (for a return of 250). The question being  should you have sent out more surveys to get 300 responses, or did you mean you only had to sample 300 people? This is an important element as it relates to the integrity of the results.

With respect to presentation of the survey results the data doesn't match the survey response numbers (eg gender has 252 responses, Age group has Education level has 230 response) what is the cause of this variance - and is it significant to the work?

More effort needs to go into the discussion of the Chi Square analysis to make the point you are trying to make.

There are formatting issues that require addressing eg s3.3

Greater effort and evidence is required to draw out the key points identified from the face-to-face consultation.

Given the lack of clarity, the presentation issues and the lack of evidence to support the assertions it is difficult to assess the integrity of the findings. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

Thank you so much for your fruitful comments on the manuscript

Kindly find the attached file with an explanation on how the corrections were tackled

Thank you

Sisincerely

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The second version of the paper is informative enough. The questionnaire and the interview questions are (will be) added as supplementary materials. The only remained shortcoming is the missing Discussion chapter. In their response the authors state that they provided it, but I could not find it in the improved manuscript. 

Author Response

Dear Revier 1,

Thank you once again for your comments

Please note that we have included the discussion chapter in section 4 of the manuscript (pages 13-15). We also highlighted all the discussion section for easy identification

Thank you

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for the opportunity to review this paper in this current form. The paper has dealt with earlier limitations and conveys a strong narrative regarding the importance of inclusive consultation with those most vulnerable and impacted by water management decisions.

 

My comment on this version would be to revisit Table 1 to clarify whether the data are speaking to 'Villages' or Villagers'.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 2,

Thank you once again for your comments. Kindly note that the data presented in Table 1 speaks to the villages, not the villagers. We have highlighted that in section 2.4 under the sub-heading  "Selection of Study Sites and Sampling."'

Thank you