Policy Responses to Direct and Underlying Drivers of Deforestation: Examining Rubber and Coffee in the Central Highlands of Vietnam

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

General comments

• Very interesting and relevant research. Unfortunately, the paper is a bit lacking in coherence and results could be structured better and made more visible by adding a couple of graphs (see comments beneath)
• Drivers of deforestation may be different from drivers of forest degradation à make this becomes clearer and be specific about these throughout the paper
• Be more precise about the time scales, as drivers also change over time (e.g. coffee conversion mostly 1990 – 2000 and rubber mostly 2005 – 2015). Eventually discuss how the changing importance of drivers was taken into account in policy responses.
• An early explanation in the paper is needed about the different actors and corresponding land tenure policies, are there differences between those converting to rubber / coffee / pepper. It would be useful to have an early overview of the different actors and how they are related to direct and underlying drivers.
• The structure of presenting the results in chapters 4.1 – 4.4. could be improved. It would help to have some type of figure which shows better how different policies are connected with different direct and underlying drivers.

Specific comments

1. 27ff Add a short definition of forest cover for Viet Nam and say what types of land uses / plantations are included, this will be key for the whole article
2. 28 natural forest, forest/tree plantations and rubber plantations à be specific
3. 34ff Eventually give a brief overview of the direct and underlying drivers for the case of Viet Nam before this paragraph
4. 54f country progress: generally speaking or for Viet Nam specifically?
5. 96f Why are interviews not primary data here? Also, if the remote sensing data is from the GoV, that should be secondary data.
6. 103 Please give more information on the interviews: topics, how many, how long, what criteria for selecting interview partners, etc
7. 121 Vietnam or Viet Nam: to be consistent
8. 123f Are their figures on forest loss during the war?
9. 124f add reference
10. 128 since when? Be precise, as before it was mentioned different time periods of deforestation and forest degradation
11. 130 various sources à be more specific
12. 136 Is cassava really a direct driver or was it planted as food crop in the first years of establishing other plantations before canopy closure? In that case it should probably not be counted as a direct driver.
13. 157 Does it mean the area under rubber cultivation? If actual yield, you need to mention the price of a few years before (as rubber cannot be tapped for the first five years), which may have led farmers to increase rubber plantations. In some regions, farmers just stop tapping rubber if price is low, which decreases harvest figures. 
14. 166 add year of the Strategy
15. 211 This is clear now. But if ethnic poor people cannot invest in coffee or rubber, who is then later converting the cassava areas into perennials?
16. 253 This table is not very convincing, use different symbols. In addition, maybe the author can break up column 1 into several, e.g. putting the year separately. Make a separate category for forest sector policies instead of putting it with general policies
17. 374 Illegal logging has not  been discussed before, although briefly mentioned conversion timber. If it is very relevant, add information here. Be clear on how it is related to deforestation/degradation 
18. 468ff As you only reviewed national-level policies, it is difficult to draw conclusions on the scales, so this chapter does not really answer the research question on scale.
19. 488ff While this chapter is well explained, it would also be useful here to have a graph with a historic timeline of drivers

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

An interesting work in a country that has undergone major changes in forestry policy and  forests per se and on commodities, especially rubber gaining in importance in the entire region. I would like to see this paper published, but in its current form, it is not ready yet. This study can and must be improved; here some suggestions (and in the pdf some more details).

Start restructuring your piece the classic way into Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion.

--In the first part, set the stage for your study. Give the reader an overview of the REDD+ initiatives globally, and then specifically in Viet Nam. And clearly state the objectives of this paper (also not fully clear to me).

--In the Methods, present the framework in more details, and list your methods/ set of tools (give references to the respecitve tools), explicitly explain which tool is  for what analysis (unclear at this stage). Framing; needs better embedding in the literature. How did you select drivers for your study, based on what? How were participants to your study selected? How did you identify relevant actors?

--Results benefit from a clear structure too: what are the current patterns of drivers (direct/indirect); how are they linked with the REDD+; what are the gaps in policy related to the scale aspect of your paper, and how are the policies linked with the relevant actors?

--In the Discussion, i would like to see your findings being juxtapositioned with other REDD+ studies from global examples. Also, a reflection on the drivers itself would be interesting: sincec Geist and Lambin, have the drivers of deforestation changed (their model is actually only applicable to deforestation; what is missing in their model is any link to reforestation / afforestation); discuss this in the context of REDD+.

Your paper is based on some literature, but you have only a handful of peer-reviewed citations. I have made suggestions for literature to be included in this study. There have been plenty of studies in Viet Nam, also in your study area. Use them. Reports are hard to access and have only limited value; they are okay to use if there is no peer-reviewed paper option at hand.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

I agreed to review this manuscript because I am interested in learning what kinds of policies work and don’t work in the promotion of environmental goals, particularly those pertaining to REDD+. I know something about deforestation and REDD+ but not much about why policies succeed or fail. This manuscript helps shed light on that question, focusing on coffee and rubber plantations in the central highlands of Viet Nam. Not surprisingly, the direct drivers of deforestation are more easily identified (and quantified?) than the underlying drivers, but this manuscript attempts to identify both types of drivers, asks if they are, in fact, correlated, and seeks to identify which policies have worked and which ones have not, and why.

I think the work is very important, and I don’t know whether there are many examples of this kind of exploration in the literature. My (naïve) judgement is that the manuscript deserves to be published. The author addresses scales explicitly. She seems to have a good grasp of the underlying drivers, policies, and their interactions. She provokes the reader to think. The analysis makes me wonder whether governments will ever be informed enough or have enough resources to deal effectively with deforestation. From a more scientific perspective, my sense is that the ultimate drivers are international, or global (predictable?), and that agent-based models are largely irrelevant except at very fine scales (but I suspect this is my bias regardless of the manuscript).

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf