Governing Community-Based Natural Resource Management in Australia: International Implications
, Ruth Potts 6 and Tom Brewer 7Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript is revised according to reviewers advise.
Author Response
Reviewer 1 - Many thanks for accepting this paper with no additional changes.
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper “Governing Community Based Natural Resource Management in Australia: International Implications” analyses the Australian Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) system to provide insights on how better design and deploy such systems nationally. The authors used a deliberative Governance Systems Analysis (GSA) framework bringing together an evaluative dialogue among researchers and practitioners with skills of relevance to Australian CBNRM. However, I did not detect any reference to this participatory exercise within the results section. I encourage the authors to add few lines to highlight the differences, if any, within the focus groups participants.
Author Response
Reviewer 2 - Thank you for this useful suggestion. To address, at line 501, we have adjusted the first discussion paragraph to read as follows:
Having analysed key governance weaknesses experienced up to and as at the end of 2014 in Australia as a case study, we hope to spark a more theory-informed discussion about what constitutes an effective national system of CBNRM governance. The application of the GSA methodological framework provides the theoretical strength behind this analysis. As a research team, however, to support nations looking to strengthen their CBNRM governance system, we strongly advise the application of GSA in a highly deliberative way. Our use of focus groups in this study helped us to ground our data gathering and analysis in the real world experience of a wide diversity of key stakeholders operating within Australia’s CBNRM governance system. In more advanced applications of this method, however, GSA can be used to help structure and to inform highly deliberative approaches to governance system codesign, performance monitoring and continuous improvement. Such an application would represent a solid system innovation in any nation.
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
In this paper, authors aim to know how best to design and deploy Community-based natural resources management (CBNRM) in Australia. They used literature review and a series of focus groups to find ways to transform or refine CBNRM in Australia. In my opinion,
1) the manuscript does not reflect the international relevance of the Australian case study or the scientific contribution of the analysis made,
2) the methods should be better explainedÑ
2.1. Page 3, Literature review. Authors could give more information about how the literature review was developed. What search engines were used? How many people were involved in the selection of cases? What cases were included/excluded in your search? How many cases were included? How many researchers were involved in the data extraction? Etc.
2.2. Page 3, Evaluative criteria. Authors could include the definition of each criteria and how they measured them.
2.3. Page 3 and 4, Analysis. Authors could give more information on the research methods used for the analysis. How many people participated in each workshops? What was the socioeconomic background of the participants? What kind of questions were asked during the workshop? Etc.
and 3) results should be improved to facilitate comprehension for readers not familiar with Australian laws and to better state how conclusions were supported by the results obtained.
Reviewer 2 Report
Authors can consider the following issues while updating the manuscript-
- Lines 63-66 - references are missing.
- A concrete research question can be included. The theoretical framework is missing.
- Methods need special considerations- You have mentioned the literature reviews but did not mention the criteria clearly.You have said about FGDs but you did not mention how many FGDs you conducted, what you have done with the FGDs data or interviews and how you analyzed the FGDs and what types of issues were discussed during the FGDs.Questionnaires as a supplementary will be fine to add.
- Results can be reorganized according to research questions.
- Limitations of the research are missing. Scope for further study can be included concisely.
Good luck!
Reviewer 3 Report
The paper “Governing Community Based Natural Resource Management in Australia: International Implications” focuses on community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) recognized as a key component of many national natural resource and rural development governance systems. The paper specifically analyses the Australian system.
The introduction introduces the discussed research context and clarifies the research objectives very clearly.
The methodological section could benefit from a much more detailed description of focus groups organization: numbers, participants details etc.
Results section is well developed.
Discussion section: I would see a more explicit reference to rural development implications
The same applies for conclusions where I see also a lack in international implications of the study.
