Satisfaction Level of Slum Dwellers with the Assistance of the City Corporation during COVID-19: The Bangladesh Context
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Review:
The paper explores an up to date and sensitive topic, the satisfaction of slum dwellers with state aid in times of covid-19. The topic is important to understand the effects of covid-19 lockdowns in different contexts, and to use experiences for future crisis situations. The researchers took a huge effort to gather this data in the difficult to approach slum dweller population. The work is very important in unveiling the truth behind government propaganda about the helping and strong state, and to explain why certain countries, regions or cities could not easily bounce back after the end of the lockdown. Therefore the research is worthy of publication and should be made available for the wider public.
However, in a social scientific publication mere descriptive data is not enough. For example the effects of the crisis and government reactions to that can tell a lot about how states and societies work. But the paper unfortunately does not engage in this sort of deeper sociological understanding. Rather it presents the data of a survey, interviews and field observation. The paper remains without exploring actual mechanisms behind the general dissatisfaction and/or how the slum dwellers could stay alive in spite of clearly insufficient state help. Such barely interpreted data description could be maybe used for policy or marketing research, but much less in theoretically anchored discourses of social sciences.
Therefore the paper needs major revision in a very fundamental sense: an actual social scientific research topic is needed to be found to turn the research findings into a social scientific publication. This is not impossible given the richness of the qualitative data and the authors’ obvious local knowledge about the country and how things work there. But the current very flat and normative yes or no question of the study (were slum dwellers satisfied or not?) is not sufficient. Especially in a case like this, where it is crystal clear: the government help was rather symbolic, merely a band aid, barely helping the survival of the most vulnerable citizens and not helping to mitigate the long term effects of the crisis at all.
The problems of this approach become even more pronounced when we read the policy recommendations: people should have got more help and actually everybody, not just people in the voting list. I don’t think this can be counted as an interesting finding/conclusion.
After carefully reading the text and making notes of the possible topics as well as the missing issues from the paper, the reviewer came up with a few suggestions how to turn this paper from survey data description and a few interview quotes into a more social scientific paper. These are just ideas, but they might reveal for the authors what is missing from their text and maybe they can be inspiring to find the actual topic of their work.
In practice the task of the authors could be to deal with a social scientific discourse they find relevant to their research, organise the literature section accordingly, and find questions in this discourse their findings talk to. This means the complete rewriting of the introduction and the literature review. In a paper like this, we don’t need to read about the history of the pandemic for example. Rather the authors should present the relevant literature focusing on the question they could talk to with their findings, observation and tacit knowledge about the context. This could result in a much more interesting paper that goes beyond the simple satisfaction/dissatisfaction question of the current text.
Being a non-native English speaker, I hardly ever write about the style and language use of papers as a reviewer. But the many times repeated or similar meaning and circular sentences and whole paragraphs with very little added value (we get to know that the covid lockdown was bad for slum dwellers at least seven times in the text, I stopped counting there...), hint on the use of generative language models. This is not a school assignment, so the use of such software is not prohibited. However, the capabilities of these language models to produce social scientific texts are very modest to say the least. I can imagine that hard science experiments and statistical data can be dealt with by these language models. But since the language model has no idea what is an interesting social scientific question (it can maybe make trick us for a very short time), it is not advised to use them in our discipline. As a non native speaker, I understand the hardships of writing in English. However, even grammatically bad sentences with actual social scientific thoughts in them are much more valuable than a generated, repetitive and content free text. I can only politely ask the authors to consider this, and not fall for the ridiculous hype about these language models. Those who claim they are very useful for any written assignments have vested interests in claiming that while they have no idea what social science actually is. It is not advised to believe these self-proclaimed experts, and the actual message of the paper should be created by humans with social scientific reflection.
It was also strange to read the short philosophical/epistemological remarks in the methodology section. These debates do not take place in methodology sections of empirical papers, so the word count could be reduced by leaving out these parts.
Suggestions:
In general, instead of writing about the story of COVID-19 and repeating many times how adversely the lockdown affected the urban poor, rather the historical, governance and institutional context of the covid measures in Bangladesh could be outlined. Then the reader could understand better the role of different actors, such as the government and authorities, local governments, NGOs, local high status people etc..
How the crisis measures were conceived and implemented is deeply related to these contextual issues but most readers outside Bangladesh know only very little about this particular context.
The relationship of the governance context and governance levels and covid measures must be already explored in the literature and the paper could relate to that.
The point would be to show that it’s not simply the lack of resources and the “natural” chaos of overcrowded low quality housing areas led to insufficient crisis management. Rather the actual mechanisms of how the state and the local state work and are related to each other, NGOs and slum dwellers could be explored by the clear failure of crisis management.
The issue of informality in the context of slums and poor countries appears in the text many times. For example, 68% of the respondents claimed that they received aid from other sources than the city corporation. But issues of citizenship in the given town or slum and political corruption (not just on the local level) appear as well.
The authors could engage with the literature of these topics and relate their case to the discourses found there.
How and to what extent the aid was tapped by political power can also be connected to the literature on corruption.
Debates about the uses and problems of informality for slum dwellers and political power could be informed by the findings of this research. Literature on how slums and informal settlements are legalised could be used or also the literature of concepts such as the porousness of the state, unmapping and clientelism to mention a few.
The higher amount of criminal activity mentioned in the text and how the state dealt with that could also be related to this literature.
A related possible topic could be governance and governance levels. For example we get to know that the prime minister ordered to take care of the crisis in a given way but then locally the process happened differently (as people didn’t get their cash aid). Also the role and status of the NUPRP, and its relation to national and local politics could be cleared and put into the context of the literature on urban governance and government levels, in this case related to crisis management.
Related to state institutions, informality, and governance levels, at many points while reading the text I was wondering how there were no unrests and revolts against the lock down rules, the actual implementation of these rules and the clearly insufficient handling of the crisis. This is a relevant question in many contexts and maybe the authors do have some sort of answer to that too in their qualitative and quantitative research. Who took the blame? Who could pacify slum dwellers in this extremely adverse situation?
The often informal nature of the aid slum dwellers received could be related to the literature of different types of care. For example the authors claimed that rich people gave aid informally, however it is not clear if these were acts of pure philanthropy, or rather clientelist or feudal relations were used or established in these cases and if these will have longer term consequences.
It is also mentioned that people took loans, and given that the text is about poor slum dwellers, perhaps much of these loans were informal with more than economic power relations between loan takers and givers. Again the clientelist relations and the weakness of the state could have been analysed or used as an angle for the description of insufficient help and its consequences.
The role of local and international NGOs could be explored better and the paper could be embedded in the literature about the relationship between these NGOs and states too.
Finally, the explored suffering of the slum dwellers caused by covid measures and their relations to higher status groups could be explored. Is class analysis sufficient to understand these differences? Or is there even deeper divide in the society between slum dwellers and the rich? Were slum dwellers also the worst affected by the illness itself, not just the lockdown measures? What about different sub-groups of slum dwellers? Did they have different interests? (This is also related to the “why no unrests” issue…)
Without further brainstorming, the reviewer hopes the authors and editors understand what is missing from the text for me. Descriptive data about the satisfaction with governance assistance is not enough. The questions and findings of the research should be part of a social scientific discourse. Not necessarily the above mentioned, but I think some of these could be actually used to interpret and present this research. I hope the authors can find a sufficient topic and deal with that.
Author Response
Please sir
See the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript presents an important issue of utmost policy relevance. However, the following observations were made:
The introduction is comprehensive about the origin and impacts of COVID-19. However, this section is devoid of significant information on the incidence, impact and control measures that were undertaken in Bangladesh. The fundamental relevance of reviewing some data on Bangladesh cases is significantly missing in this article.
It is also important to note that the authors used COVID-19, Covid 19, covid 19, corona and Covid-19 interchangeably. It is important for the author to use “COVID-19” throughout the document. Also, the article requires comprehensive grammatical verifications and corrections.
The introduction is lacking some definite research gaps and the relevance the study would make for policy formulation.
Section two of the article is almost a perfect repetition of what had been presented in section 1. It is also not clear the theoretical perspective being presented by the authors. I therefore suggest that this section should be removed.
On the research methodology, there is the need for section 3 to be properly divided. It is important to have a section on the study area, the research design and sampling methods, and data collection instrument. In its present form, the article mixed everything together but there is the need for proper separation.
The author on line 231 indicated that APA referencing style was used. There is the need to follow the referencing style of the journal
The results section should also be revised with presentation of the nature of question being discussed in the FGD before presenting the results. There is no need to present too generic issues that had been covered in the introduction. The important issues being raised at FGD should be highlighted before presenting the results.
There is need for comprehensive revision of some grammatical inconsistencies in this article.
Author Response
Please sir
See the attachment below
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Title: Satisfaction Level of Slum Dwellers with the Assistance of the City Corporation During Covid 19: The Bangladesh Context Binocular.
Dear authors,
I would like to provide you with a series of comments based on the reading and analysis I have conducted on your manuscript. Please keep in mind that my comments aim to help improve your manuscript, generate greater impact, and make it more appealing for citation, thus contributing to the good reputation of the journal.
Please note that these are suggestions, and I encourage you to consider those that you feel do not distort the purpose or objectives of your study.
0) Title: The title is fine, as it captures the essence of the paper.
i) Abstract:
It is well written and well-structured, providing details on the context, objective, method, and results.
If anything, in lines 21-22 of the abstract, I would better explain the implications of the results on how governmental entities should act when facing similar situations or something similar that denotes the implications of your results.
ii) Background of the study.
Line 48-49: "Because of the pandemic lockdown, developing countries such as India suffered significant economic losses." - This argument requires a citation/reference to support it.
Line 60-65: The information provided in these lines mentions that Bangladesh is one of the most populous countries and has experienced economic losses due to the pandemic. Additionally, demographic data is presented, which seems to be current and post-pandemic. However, this argument is supported by a reference from 2017 (i.e., Zaman et al., 2017). It is necessary to support this citation with data or a reference from after the declaration of the health emergency (after March 2020).
Line 86: "NGOs?" - NGOs stands for Non-Governmental Organizations. Acronyms need to be introduced the first time they are used.
Line 86-89: This argument requires a reference to support it.
Line 67 and 96: Clarify in line 67 what CNG stands for. Acronyms need to be introduced the first time they are used.
Line 106-107: What type of strategies did the NGOs and the government of Bangladesh use?
iii) Assistances of City Corporation to the Slum Dwellers during Covid-19: a Theoretical Perspective
Line 146: Standardize the term "COVID-19" to either uppercase or lowercase. Also, in line 120, where only "COVID" is mentioned, standardize trhoughout the text whether it should be "COVID-19," "covid-19," "covid 19," or "covid."
Line 153: Develop or explain what is meant by "temporary identity."
Line 159: Clarify if the support of $25 was given on a weekly, monthly, annual basis, or if it was a one-time payment.
Line 160: Change "(NURP) National Urban Poverty Reduction Program" to "National Urban Poverty Reduction Program (NURP)."
Line 170, 171, 172, 173, 174: Standardize the term "COVID-19."
Line 170-178: It might be convenient to briefly highlight in one or two lines the main findings of the mentioned studies. Something concise but informative.
Line 175: Provide references at the end of the sentence after "and many others."
3 Research Methodology.
Line 194: Remove the word "beautiful" as this argument is subjective.
Figure 1: Improve the quality and design of the image. Silhet City is rotated in relation to the map of Bangladesh, causing confusion. It is not clear that Silhet City corresponds to the reference on the map of Bangladesh. Additionally, the arrows are coming out of one area, and there is a black dot in another area. The study area polygons in Silhet can be changed to a different color instead of placing numbers in circles.
Line 214: Change "5" to "Five."
Line 216: Change "(Table:1)" to "(Table 1)."
Line 217 and 221: Standardize the term "COVID-19."
Line 214-222: Standardize the term "City Corporation."
Line 227: Change "google scholar" to "Google Scholar."
Line 226-232: Mention the language of the selected materials. Were the materials only in English? Or what was the language criterion? Also, specify the time horizon considered. Materials from 2020 to 2023, or from 2020 to 2021? Please specify.
Table 1: Standardize uppercase or lower case throughout the text
Table 2: Standardize uppercase or lower case throughout the text
Have you considered including the questions that were part of the semi-structured interview as a table or annex?
iv) Data presentation and findings with qualitative and quantitative approaches.
Line 268 and 269: Standardize the term "COVID-19" or "COVID 19" or "COVID-19."
Figure 3: Improve the graph, avoid using 3D bar charts.
Figure 3: In the caption, please also standardize the term "COVID-19" throughout the text.
Figure 4: Improve the graph, avoid using 3D bar charts.
Figure 5: Improve the graph, avoid using 3D bar charts.
Figure 6, 7, and 8: Standardize the design of the graphs. Both are pie charts. Consider not using 3D.
Line 336: Change 5.2 of "Types of Assistance Received during COVID-19" to 4.2. There is an error in the enumeration.
Line 381: There is an error in the enumeration. It should be 4.3 instead of 5.3.
Line 451: "State Minister."
Line 587: Perhaps they do not apply to other developed or developing countries.
Discussion: The discussion is well done.
Limitations and Conclusions are fine.
References: Very good, the majority are from 2020 onwards (over 90%).
Author Response
Please sir
See the attached file
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors have addressed my comments
The English can be improved.
Reviewer 3 Report
I thank the authors for taking my comments into account. I hope that, like me, they are more satisfied with their manuscript.
