Assessing Public Participation Performance in China’s Sponge City and LID Projects: An Application of a Multi-Dimensional Evaluation Framework

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

1) In Section 3.1.2, you describe a standardized multi-source retrieval protocol but the actual keyword sets, retrieval thresholds and stopping criteria are deferred to supplementary materials. This weakens reproducibility because the core data construction step is not fully transparent in the main text. You should include at least a summarized version of the retrieval logic (example keywords, minimum hits per project, handling of conflicting records) directly in the paper. How can readers assess the completeness and bias of your project inventory if the retrieval procedure is not explicitly auditable within the main manuscript?

2) In Section 3.2, the auditability threshold (S3 ≥ 4 and lifecycle completeness) is imposed as a hard eligibility constraint, but you do not justify why this threshold is theoretically or empirically appropriate. This choice may systematically exclude projects with weaker documentation but potentially meaningful participation practices, creating selection bias toward well-documented cases. You should provide sensitivity analysis or justification for this cutoff. What happens to your results if the S3 threshold is relaxed or varied across cities with different documentation cultures?

3) In Section 3.1, you rely on entropy-weighted TOPSIS, but the feature construction and normalization process is not clearly specified. For example, it is unclear how qualitative proxies like “typicality” or “policy alignment” are quantified before entering the MCDA. This raises concerns about hidden subjectivity in what is presented as a quantitative selection process. You should explicitly define the scoring scales and normalization procedures for each feature. How do you ensure that subjective feature encoding does not dominate the supposedly objective TOPSIS ranking?

4) In Section 3.4.2, you mention sensitivity analysis for handling Evidence Missing (EM), but the results are only referenced in supplementary Table S5 and not discussed in the main text. Given that EM appears frequently (Table 5), this is a critical methodological issue that could affect rankings. You should explicitly report how different EM treatments change project scores and rankings. Without this, the robustness of your findings remains unclear. To what extent do your cross-city comparisons depend on how missing evidence is treated?

5) In the Results and Discussion, you interpret higher maintenance-stage scores as indicating stronger institutionalization of participation, but this inference may conflate documentation visibility with actual participation quality. Since your method relies on documentary evidence, later stages naturally produce more records (O&M contracts), which could inflate scores. You should more critically separate observability from substantive participation. How can you justify that higher maintenance scores reflect real governance strength rather than simply better documentation availability at later stages?

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This work concentrates on evaluation of public participation in Low Impact Development (LID) projects of Sponge Cities in China, this paper constructs a life-cycle sensitive multidimensional evaluation framework. I recommend that the manuscript be considered for publication after major revisions. My detailed comments are as follows:
Major comments

1. The authors picked only one sample project from each city to do detailed analysis. A single project can hardly represent the governance level or "mainstream model" of the entire city.
2. There is no explanation provided for the indicator weights and setting parameters of the TOPSIS model, which raises concerns about the scientific basis of the representative project selection.
3. Lines 82-92: Dimension-indicator mapping lacks clarity. It will also require the inclusion of calculation process.
4. Lines 554-555: Table 5 shows that the Xiamen project is missing 14 data points (EM=14), accounting for 21.9% of the total indicators. As a result, this lack of data has a direct effect upon the validity of the comparative analysis, therefore the situation needs to be described in more detail.
5. Table 5 shows Shenzhen ranking first and Wuhan ranking second; Table 6 shows Shenzhen ranking first, but Wuhan ranking fourth. Normally, the overall score of a project should be unique, and the weighted total scores should not have such a significant deviation. This needs to be clarified.
6. Lines 572-575, 658-660: A detailed weight calculation process should be provided to ensure its applicability.

Minor comments

1. Lines 273-279: Figure 2 shows the locations of the five cities.It is recommended to add labels for the catchment area boundaries.
2. Lines 563, 623: Figures 3 and 4 lack error bars preventing the reader from making a statistical significance judgment.
3. Lines 495-500: The kappa values for each dimension should be listed to demonstrate the robustness of the scoring process.
4. There are few references published after 2020, lacking citations of the latest policies regarding Sponge Cities.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx