Impacts of Social Trust on Rural Households’ Attitudes Towards Ecological Conservation—Example of the Giant Panda Nature Reserves in China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors modified the text according to the submitted requirements, or explained the requirements. Articles can be published.
Author Response
We sincerely appreciate the comments from the reviewers.
We checked the grammer and English language throughout the paper and revised the paper accordingly.
Reviewer 2 Report
Rev FORESTS
This is an interesting manuscript exploring attitudes toward a iconic species of high conservation concern in China. The concept of interpersonal and institutional trust is very inetersting and still poor used in conservation literature. Data set is large and represnetative, statistic is good (but see below), text is well written with an English fluently in style and language (but I am not a Mother Tongue). In conclusions authors reported caveat of your study: good. The model applied (section 3.2) is interesting. I think that this ms deserves to be published only with MINOR REVISIONS. Here below I added some minor points and suggestions that, I hope, could improve a bit your interesting and useful paper.
MINOR POINT
Row 83. Add a point after ‘al’
row 97-101. See also the literature about Human DImension in Wildlife Conservation and the meaning of Values, Attitudes, and so on. See for example: Saberwal, V. K., & Kothari, A. (1996). The human dimension in conservation biology curricula in developing countries. Conservation Biology, 10(5), 1328-1331; Dickman, A., Marchini, S., & Manfredo, M. (2013). The human dimension in addressing conflict with large carnivores. Key topics in conservation biology, 2(1), 110-126. And Manfredo, M. J., Teel, T. L., & Dietsch, A. M. (2016). Implications of human value shift and persistence for biodiversity conservation. Conservation Biology, 30(2), 287-296.
Row 114. ‘….has at least has two dimensions’: delete ‘has’ (doubled).
Row 152. ‘Figure1’ change to ‘Figure 1’ (Add white sace between word and number).
Row 183. When you introduce the Gian Panda as a species you should add the scientific name.
Row 197. Which difference between ‘cognition’ and ‘awareness’? Explian better.
Please improve the decription of statistic used. You should report the handbook utilized to perform the test (Zar? Sokal and Rohlf? Fowler and Cohen? Dytham?). Please add the alpha level (0.05?) and the software utilized (PAST? SPSS? R?).
In discussion references are lacking. For example, in the sentence: ‘Participatory management, providing skills training and de-424 velopment projects are good choices for NRs authorities to enhance the connection be tween NRs and communities.’, you should add a ref. For ‘partecipatory analysis’. (see Treves, A., Wallace, R. B., & White, S. (2009). Participatory planning of interventions to mitigate human–wildlife conflicts. Conservation biology, 23(6), 1577-1587.).
SInce this study is useful in a ‘context analysis’ carried out by a Gouvernement Agency aimed to protect the Giant Panda, I suggest to include a sentence indicating where, in a conservation project cycle, this analysis could be useful (in this regard, see ‘Unifying the trans-disciplinary arsenal of project management tools in a single logical framework: Further suggestion for IUCN project cycle development’. Journal for Nature Conservation, 41, 63-72, 2018). In this paper in the context analysis represents the first step where the socio-ecological context is analysed so allowing the starting of a conservation project.
Have a nice work.
Author Response
We sincerely appreciate the comments from the reviewers. We have itemized the comments and addressed them individually as follows.
Reviewer #2
Comment 1: Row 83. Add a point after ‘al’.
Response 1: Agreed. We have revised it accordingly.
Comment 2: row 97-101. See also the literature about Human DImension in Wildlife Conservation and the meaning of Values, Attitudes, and so on. See for example: Saberwal, V. K., & Kothari, A. (1996). The human dimension in conservation biology curricula in developing countries. Conservation Biology, 10(5), 1328-1331; Dickman, A., Marchini, S., & Manfredo, M. (2013). The human dimension in addressing conflict with large carnivores. Key topics in conservation biology, 2(1), 110-126. And Manfredo, M. J., Teel, T. L., & Dietsch, A. M. (2016). Implications of human value shift and persistence for biodiversity conservation. Conservation Biology, 30(2), 287-296.
Response 2: Row 97-101 in our paper gives the definition of social trust. We read the recommending papers thoroughly, however, we thought it is hard for us to reference these papers. However, these papers do remind us about how to improve the social trust for the government, hence we added the contents of recommendations for the government in the second paragraph of the Conclusion and Policy Implications section, as follow,
“Therefore, the government should continue to improve its informal systems while developing high-quality formal institutions through the following ways: first, efficiently protecting private property rights. Only people anticipated that their private property have been efficiently protected, they had the motivation of long-term cooperation and high social trust. Second, standardize the government behavior. Government behaviors have con-trolled all the institutional environment in which trust is formed, hence effective constraint on government behaviors is beneficial for individuals predicating the future and building trust, while the short-term, especially frequently changed government behaviors would impair the social trust[66].”
Comment 3: Row 114. ‘….has at least has two dimensions’: delete ‘has’ (doubled).
Response 3: Agreed. We have revised it accordingly.
Comment 4: Row 152. ‘Figure1’ change to ‘Figure 1’ (Add white sace between word and number).
Response 4: Agreed. We have revised it accordingly.
Comment 5: Row 183. When you introduce the Giant Panda as a species you should add the scientific name.
Response 5: Agreed. We added the scientific name of Giant panda.
Comment 6: Row 197. Which difference between ‘cognition’ and ‘awareness’? Explain better.
Response 6: Agreed. In order to avoid misunderstanding, we changed word ‘cognition’ into ‘attitudes’.
Comment 7: Please improve the description of statistic used. You should report the handbook utilized to perform the test (Zar? Sokal and Rohlf? Fowler and Cohen? Dytham?). Please add the alpha level (0.05?) and the software utilized (PAST? SPSS? R?).
Response 7: Agreed. We added the sentence in the last paragraph of section 3.2, as follow “We used Stata 12.0 to analyze the data.” Besides, we didn’t perform any test in our description statistics, because it is hard for us to separate all the respondents into different groups by social trust, especially we have four social trust variables.
Comment 8: Since this study is useful in a ‘context analysis’ carried out by a Government Agency aimed to protect the Giant Panda, I suggest to include a sentence indicating where, in a conservation project cycle, this analysis could be useful (in this regard, see ‘Unifying the trans-disciplinary arsenal of project management tools in a single logical framework: Further suggestion for IUCN project cycle development’. Journal for Nature Conservation, 41, 63-72, 2018). In this paper in the context analysis represents the first step where the socio-ecological context is analysed so allowing the starting of a conservation project.
Response 8: Agreed. We revised the first sentences of the second paragraph in Introduction section, as follow, “As the main stakeholders in biodiversity conservation, rural households’ attitudes towards ecological protection are considered to be the crucial factor to achieve the effectiveness of the NRs’ conservation target and the related conservation projects [7].”
We trust our responses have adequately addressed your comments. Please let us know if further changes or clarifications are needed.
Best regards,
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
The authors conducted their research on the example of households in villages in and around Giant Panda Reserves in two provinces in China.
The topic of the relationship between local communities and nature conservation is important worldwide. On the other hand, it is debatable whether anything can be expected from a social trust other than a positive effect on the perception of environmental protection.
I believe that the topic is not well understood and / or sufficiently explained. The authors should explain the real impacts of GP NRs management on local residents. It then makes sense to address the population's attitude to these impacts and how they can be influenced.
It is also necessary to explain and describe the social trust in the model villages in general. Then it would be interesting to compare in more detail the approach of groups of respondents to the impacts of nature conservation management.
So my general remark is that the article addresses the topic superficially, without a deeper knowledge of the causes.
Other comments:
Line 34 - although this is obvious, the acronym PA needs to be explained
Line 44 - So what are household’s natural resources livelihood strategies?
Lines 46 - 48 - "Stimulating ..." - is a completely meaningless and self-evident statement
Lines 53-56 - "The general conclusion ..." does not fall into this part and is indeed very general
Line 150 - "Incentive mechanism" - this is not the whole sentence
Figure 1 - is very general and incomplete. Are there really no other mechanisms in the process? Where, for example, is education? And the impacts of nature conservation management on households? What is a restrictive mechanism?
Subchapter 3.1. - The authors state the different numbers of nature reserves - how did the resulting thirteen come from?
Subchapter 3.2. - the formula needs to be further clarified. Why do these quantities enter it? How do the individual variables affect the result? The formula described in this way looks inaccurate and unreliable
Subchapter 3.3.1 - why are the results partially presented in the Methods chapter? The questions are very vague. The whole questionnaire is missing in the appendix to the article !!!
Subchapter 4.1. - lines 276 - 277 - "Household with higher ..." is it the result of a research or citation? In addition, again very general.
Based on the above comments, it is necessary to state that the research design is very weak and the results are superficial. In order to publish the research, it is necessary for the authors to describe:
1) what impacts does nature conservation management have on communities
2) how communities perceive these impacts and what are their manifestations on social trust
3) interpreted their results and their possible causes in more detail
Author Response
We sincerely appreciate the comments from the reviewers. We have itemized the comments and addressed them individually as follows.
Comment 1: The authors should explain the real impacts of GP NRs management on local residents. It then makes sense to address the population's attitude to these impacts and how they can be influenced. In order to publish the research, it is necessary for the authors to describe:
1) what impacts does nature conservation management have on communities
2) how communities perceive these impacts and what are their manifestations on social trust
3) interpreted their results and their possible causes in more detail
Response 1: Agreed. According to the reviewer’s comments, we added some description about what impacts does NRs have on communities and how these impacts affect households’ social trust in the fourth paragraph of the Introduction Section, as follow
“Second, the regulation of NRs and their conservation activities may have significant consequences for local people’s social trust. For example, Studies have shown that although the contra-diction between NRs and local villages is decreasing, they still exist and should not be ignored, because most rural households in NRs bear more costs than the benefits gained after establishing NRs [15], which might lead to trust crisis in NRs authorities and even local government. Besides, Duan et al, have proved that the establishment of NRs exacerbated income inequality of local households due to the uneven distribution of compensation and the unequal development opportunities, which might impact the traditional interpersonal relationship and harm the trust in villagers and villager cadres [6]. Hence, a better understanding of the association between social trust of households surrounding NRs and their conservation attitudes is helpful for realizing the NRs’ conservation goals.”
We also explained the possible cause of our results more specifically in both the Results Section and the Conclusions and Policy Implications Section, for example, second paragraph of the subtitle 4.2, “Granovetter described the relationship between neighbors as “strong ties”, and is characterized by long-term, high-frequency interactions (Chinese idiom: di tou bu jian tai tou jian) [45]. Especially in villages surrounding NRs in China, where most of them located in remote mountainous areas, interpersonal trust plays a crucial role in rural society.”
Third paragraph of the subtitle 4.2, “Studies also demonstrated that the higher level of trust in villager cadres is, the lower executory costs of environmental conservation policy is [48].” ,“As a formal institution, trust in government reflect rural households’ motivation of obey-ing the regulation, hence significantly improve their conservation attitudes.”
Second paragraph of title 5, “Unlike formal institutional arrangements, social cooperation in the provision of public goods lacks third-party scrutiny. Thus, how to supervise and punish free-riders is a core issue faced by social cooperation participants. The large-radius interpersonal trust pro-vides an effective solution to this supervising problem [49]. There usually exist many moral constraints and social norms in a community with high level of social trust, where local residents tend to obey rather than go against these social norms. [34]”
We also added some description about why social trust is especially crucial in communities surrounding NRs, as follow
“In rural areas of China, the establishment and development of formal institutions are relatively hysteretic, therefore interpersonal trust plays an important role in the development of Chinese rural society.”
“In rural areas surrounding NRs of China, trust in government is helpful for rural house-holds’ comprehension and support of NRs’ regulations, and adopt eco-friendly livelihood strategies.”
Comment 2: It is also necessary to explain and describe the social trust in the model villages in general.
Response 2: Agreed. We added the section 4.1 Descriptive statistics of variables, and describe all the variables in our study, including the description of social trust, as follow
“When it comes to social trust variables, rural households trust their neighbors most, then villagers and government, and trust village cadres least.”
Comment 3: Line 34 - although this is obvious, the acronym PA needs to be explained.
Response 3: Agreed. We changed PA into NR throughout the paper.
Comment 4: Line 44 - So what are household’s natural resources livelihood strategies?
Response 4: Agreed. We deleted this term, and rewrote the sentence, as follow
“Relevant studies have demonstrated that rural households' attitudes towards ecological conservation can be used to predict the households' natural resources utilization intensity, the acceptance level of NRs’ conservation projects, and the responses to conservation measures [1–2,8].”
Comment 5: Lines 46 - 48 - "Stimulating ..." - is a completely meaningless and self-evident statement?
Response 5: Agreed. We deleted the word “Stimulating” and rewrote the sentence, as follow
“Rural households’ positive conservation attitudes is beneficial for achieving the conservation goal, while the negative conservation attitudes might hamper the conservation target [9].”
Comment 6: Lines 53-56 - "The general conclusion ..." does not fall into this part and is indeed very general.
Response 6: Agreed. We revised the sentences as follow
“Researchers have attempted to explain the heterogeneity of rural households’ con-servation attitudes, and several fairly consistent, and often overlapping, findings have emerged. They concluded that rural households' education level, social capital, family wealth, relationship to NRs, and perceptions of the costs and benefits induced by the es-tablishment of NRs are the most significant influencing factors for their attitudes towards ecological conservation.”
Comment 7: Line 150 - "Incentive mechanism" - this is not the whole sentence.
Response 7: Agreed. We deleted the expression of “Information-sharing mechanism”, “Restrictive mechanism” and “Incentive mechanism”, and explained the impact mechanism in sentences, as follow
“(1) Improving the efficiency of information delivery.”, “(2) Restricting environmental destructive behaviors.” and “(3) Promoting livelihood strategy transformation.”
Comment 8: Figure 1 - is very general and incomplete. Are there really no other mechanisms in the process? Where, for example, is education? And the impacts of nature conservation management on households? What is a restrictive mechanism?
Response 8: Partially agreed. We deleted the expression of “Information-sharing mechanism”, “Restrictive mechanism” and “Incentive mechanism”, and redrew the figure 1. According to our theoretical analysis, we concluded three impact paths, and education is not included in. We described the impact of NRs on households’ livelihoods and how these impact affect their social trust in the Introduction Section, however, this study focus on the relationship between social trust and conservation attitudes, hence we didn’t include the impact of NRs on livelihoods in Figure 1.
Comment 9: Subchapter 3.1. - The authors state the different numbers of nature reserves - how did the resulting thirteen come from?
Response 9: Agreed. We explained the number of NRs selected as our study area in footnote 3, as follow
“There are 46 giant panda nature reserves in Sichuan Province and 16 giant panda nature reserves in Shaanxi Province. According to the 25% sampling standard, 12 reserves in Sichuan Province and 4 reserves in Shaanxi Province need to be sampled for research. Since each reserve needs to investigate four villages, and only two villages are involved around Huangbaiyuan nature reserve, hence Niuweihe nature reserve was added to the study as a supplement. Niuweihe nature reserve is adjacent to Huangbaiyuan nature reserve and has belonged to the same nature reserve in history. Therefore, the natural resource endowment and policy constraints of rural households are similar.”
Comment 10: Subchapter 3.2. - the formula needs to be further clarified. Why do these quantities enter it? How do the individual variables affect the result? The formula described in this way looks inaccurate and unreliable.
Response 10: Agreed. We added some references about why we chose respondent characteristics, family characteristics, linkage to NRs, and perceived conservation costs and benefits as our independent variables, as follow
“Studies have shown that rural households' characteristics, family characteristics, linkage to NRs, and perceived conservation costs and benefits are important factors influencing their conservation attitudes[2,35].”
We also added some references about the specific variables chose in subtitle 3.32 and 3.33, as follow
“According to Luhmann [36] and Möllering [37], social trust was divided into inter-personal trust and institutional trust. Following Kei [38] and Zhou [39], two variables are used to represent individuals’ interpersonal trust: trust in neighbors and trust in villagers, while trust in village officials and trust in government are used to present institutional trust.”,
“Direct costs include the average costs of resettlements, the loss caused by wildlife damage, the loss caused by the timber harvesting ban [40-41]. Direct benefits include income of wild plant collection from the NRs (such as Chinese herbs, mushrooms and wild vegetables), business income from family tourism management (including restaurants, stores, family inns, etc.), wage income from the employment opportunities provided by NRs (including forest rangers, tourism services such as tourist guides, drivers, park conductor etc.), subsides (compensations for wildlife damage, compensations for public welfare forests, etc.) [42-44].”
Comment 11: Subchapter 3.3.1 - why are the results partially presented in the Methods chapter? The questions are very vague. The whole questionnaire is missing in the appendix to the article !
Response 11: Agreed. We removed the table in the results section, and added the section 4.1 Descriptive statistics of variables, and describe all the variables in our study, as follow
“4.1. Descriptive Statistics of Variables
Statistical results of the variables are shown in table 1. In terms of households’ conservation attitudes, 62.52% of the respondents supported the establishment of the giant panda reserve, 75.03% of the respondents were willing to participate in wildlife conservation, and 30.71% of them said ecological protection was more important than economic development in their village, indicating that most of the rural households in our study area hold positive conservation attitudes. When it comes to social trust variables, rural households trust their neighbors most, then villagers and government, and trust village cadres least. In respondent characteristics, about 84% of the respondents are male, and the average age and education are 55.71 and 7.15, respectively. In family characteristics, the average annual income of rural households is 57,600 yuan, the average housing area is 77.23 m2, and the average livestock value is 1025 yuan. The average cropland area and forestland area are 3.68 and 20.23 mu, respectively, indicating that households surrounding NRs have less livelihood capital. In terms of perception of conservation costs and benefits, the average direct benefits and costs are 3606 and 4635 yuan, respectively, and the average indirect benefits and costs are 0.57 and 0.64, respectively, showing that rural households in our study area beard more conservation costs than benefits. When it comes to households’ connection with the NRs, the average times of households contacted with NR’s staff last year is 1.86, and about 24% and 40% of the rural households have participated in NRs’ skill training and development projects.”
We also added the questionnaires in the appendix.
Comment 12: Subchapter 4.1. - lines 276 - 277 - "Household with higher ..." is it the result of a research or citation? In addition, again very general.
Response 12: It is a citation support for our results.
Reviewer 2 Report
This is an interesting piece of work, examining the influence of social trust on the conservation attitudes of people in China, located within or proximal to nature reserves. The idea of social trust is broken down into two different elements - institutional trust and interpersonal trust. Interpersonal trust is further broken down into trust in neighbours (proximal) and other villagers (more distant). Overall I found this manuscript to be well argued and written. I do have some concerns, primarily around the conceptualisation of trust and with the methods needing some additional clarity.
The conceptualisation of social trust into interpersonal and institutional trust is a relatively coarse one that does not capture the many nuances of trust. Interpersonal trust is comprised of multiple elements, which are not discussed nor even mentioned. There are at least two ideas of institutional trust - one that institutional trust is a 'generalised' type of interpersonal trust (we trust the people that are at the interface of a particular institution) and the more intrinsic trust (that you appear to consider), where the institutions and the way they operate meet our expectations, therefore we trust them. I also found a bit of a conflation between institutional trust what has been termed calculus-based trust/process-based trust/rational/rational-calculative trust, which are, first, disputed as to whether it is trust and second, more oriented towards the 'strength' of trust.
To summarise my point, I think that there needs to be more nuance in your conceptualisation of interpersonal and institutional trust.
Some references that may be useful:
Interpersonal/Institutional trust:
Lewicki, RJ & Benedict Bunker, B. 1995. Trust in relationships: A model of development and decline. IN Benedict Bunker, B & Rubin, JZ (Eds). Conflict, Cooperation and Justice: Essays Inspired by the Work of Morton Deutsch. Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, CA.
Mishler, W & Rose, R. 1997. Trust, Distrust and Scepticism: Popular Evaluations of Civil and Political Institutions in Post-Communist Societies. The Journal of Politics, 59: 418-451.
Möllering, G. 2005. The trust/control duality - A integrative perspective on positive expectations of others. International Sociology, 20: 283-305.
Uslaner, E. 2004. Trust and Social Bonds: Faith in Others and Policy outcomes reconsidered. Political Research Quarterly, 57: 501-507.
Winter, P & Cvetkovitch, G 2007. Diversity in Southwesterners' views of Forest Service fire management. IN Martin, WE, Raish, C & Kent, B. (Eds). Wildfire Risk: Human Perceptions and Management Implications. Resources for the Future Press: Washington, DC.
Calculus/Process-based/Rational/Rational-Calculative Trust:
Maguire, S, Phillips, N & Hardy, C 2001. When 'Silence = Death', keep talking: Trust, control and the discursive construction of identity in the Canadian HIV/AIDS treatment domain. Organization Studies, 22: 285-310.
Möllering, G. 2005. Rational, institutional and active trustÖ Just Do it!_ IN Bijlsma-Frankema, K / Woothuis, R (Eds). Trust Under Pressure: Empirical Investigations of Trust and Trust Building in Uncertain Circumstances. Edward Elgar: Cheltenham.
Möllering, G. 2005. Understanding trust from the perspective of sociological neoinstitutionalism: The interplay of institutions and agency. MPIfG Discussion Papers. Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies: Cologne.
Neu, D. 1991. Trust, contracting and the prospectus process. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 16: 243-256.
Swain, C & Tait, M. 2007. The crisis of trust and planning. Planning Theory and Practice, 8: 229-247.
In terms of the methodology, it would be valuable to know what questions were asked in the survey/interview (perhaps as a supplemental material file). Was it that people were simply asked whether and how much they trusted their neighbours, others in the village and the institutions surrounding nature preserves (stated preferences) or were there questions employed to gain insights into people's trust and levels of trust through revealed preferences? The general impression I get is that people were asked to state their preferences. The strengths and limitations to the approach taken should also be discussed.
In your model, I would suggest that you could use some references to support your assumptions and the specifications that you have used.
In your results/discussion, I wonder if it really is social trust or whether it is conforming to social norms that are playing a large part in people's support? At the very least, I think there should be some discussion of this.
A few minor issues to reflect on:
At line 34, you use the acronym PA - spell this out the first time you use it. If it is short for protected area, it may be worth keeping the terminology consistent, using Nature reserves.
Line 94, the reference Messick & Kramer is not in the reference list.
Line 217 the reference 'Guido [35]' should actually be Möllering; Guido is his first name.
Author Response
We sincerely appreciate the comments from the reviewers. We have itemized the comments and addressed them individually as follows.
Comment 1: The conceptualisation of social trust into interpersonal and institutional trust is a relatively coarse one that does not capture the many nuances of trust. Interpersonal trust is comprised of multiple elements, which are not discussed nor even mentioned. There are at least two ideas of institutional trust - one that institutional trust is a 'generalised' type of interpersonal trust (we trust the people that are at the interface of a particular institution) and the more intrinsic trust (that you appear to consider), where the institutions and the way they operate meet our expectations, therefore we trust them. I also found a bit of a conflation between institutional trust what has been termed calculus-based trust/process-based trust/rational/rational-calculative trust, which are, first, disputed as to whether it is trust and second, more oriented towards the 'strength' of trust.
To summarise my point, I think that there needs to be more nuance in your conceptualisation of interpersonal and institutional trust.
Response 1: Agreed. We read the literatures the reviewer recommended and also some additional literatures, and found that right now there is no consistent classification about the social trust, while in most of the empirical studies, they do measure trust in interpersonal trust and institutional trust, which is consistent with ours. We added some description about the definition of trust, as follow
“Scholars have attempted to classify the dimensions of trust, and some inconsistent, and often overlapping, findings have emerged. Though the literature review, we conclude that trust has at least has two dimensions. The first, what we call interpersonal trust, some literatures named personal trust, social trust or simply as generalized trust, refers to trust in others within a society, linking individuals with each other, and is a reflection of social bonds [25]. Interpersonal trust had just limit the definition of trust to the 'people' or the situation among the people”
“Second, trust in significant institutions, such as the government and the legal system, and is based on contracts, regulations, and other institutions. We called this kind of trust as institutional trust . Conceptually speaking, institutional trust is different from that of interpersonal trust, while interpersonal trust measures personal assessment of individuals, institutional trust measures that of collective as a whole (Young Min Baek, Chan Su Jung) . In rural areas surrounding NRs of China, trust in government is helpful for rural households’ comprehension and support of NRs’ regulations, and adopt eco-friendly livelihood strategies.”
We also added two footnotes about the inconsistent view of institutional trust, as follow
“One of our reviewer reminded us there are at least two views of institutional trust - one that institutional trust is a 'generalised' type of interpersonal trust, namely we trust the people that are at the interface of a particular institution, and the other is the more intrinsic trust, where the institutions and the way they operate meet our expectations, therefore we trust them. In this paper, institutional trust refers to the second definition.”
“Sztompka (1999) believes that institutional trust cannot be easily separated from interpersonal trust, namely if people distrust in an organization, then they will not have confidence on the organization members. While in this study, we used trust in government and the government’s agent-village leaders as the proxy of institutional trust, and used trust in neighbors and villagers as the proxy of interpersonal trust. Rural households can easily distinguish the difference of their trust in different objects during our survey.
”
Comment 2: In terms of the methodology, it would be valuable to know what questions were asked in the survey/interview (perhaps as a supplemental material file). Was it that people were simply asked whether and how much they trusted their neighbours, others in the village and the institutions surrounding nature preserves (stated preferences) or were there questions employed to gain insights into people's trust and levels of trust through revealed preferences? The general impression I get is that people were asked to state their preferences. The strengths and limitations to the approach taken should also be discussed.
Response 2: Agreed. We added the questionnaire in the appendix. And we discussed about the limitation of how we survey social trust in the last paragraph of the Section 5, as follow
“First, this study measured trust in questionnaires based on hypothetical questions, which might not accurately reflect the respondents’ real trust propensity, the realistic environment and local social norms would affect their answers. Further analysis could combined economic experiment methods with questionnaire survey to measure trust more accurately.”
Comment 3: In your model, I would suggest that you could use some references to support your assumptions and the specifications that you have used.
Response 3: Agreed. We added some references about why we chose respondent characteristics, family characteristics, linkage to NRs, and perceived conservation costs and benefits as our independent variables, as follow
“Studies have shown that rural households' characteristics, family characteristics, linkage to NRs, and perceived conservation costs and benefits are important factors influencing their conservation attitudes[2,35].”
We also added some references about the specific variables chose in subtitle 3.32 and 3.33, as follow
“According to Luhmann [36] and Möllering [37], social trust was divided into inter-personal trust and institutional trust. Following Kei [38] and Zhou [39], two variables are used to represent individuals’ interpersonal trust: trust in neighbors and trust in villagers, while trust in village officials and trust in government are used to present institutional trust.”,
“Direct costs include the average costs of resettlements, the loss caused by wildlife damage, the loss caused by the timber harvesting ban [40-41]. Direct benefits include income of wild plant collection from the NRs (such as Chinese herbs, mushrooms and wild vegetables), business income from family tourism management (including restaurants, stores, family inns, etc.), wage income from the employment opportunities provided by NRs (including forest rangers, tourism services such as tourist guides, drivers, park conductor etc.), subsides (compensations for wildlife damage, compensations for public welfare forests, etc.) [42-44].”
Comment 4: In your results/discussion, I wonder if it really is social trust or whether it is conforming to social norms that are playing a large part in people's support? At the very least, I think there should be some discussion of this.
Response 4: Agreed. We added some discussion about the social trust and social norms, as follow
“Unlike formal institutional arrangements, social cooperation in the provision of public goods lacks third-party scrutiny. Thus, how to supervise and punish free-riders is a core issue faced by social cooperation participants. The large-radius interpersonal trust pro-vides an effective solution to this supervising problem [49]. There usually exist many moral constraints and social norms in a community with high level of social trust, where local residents tend to obey rather than go against these social norms. [34]”
Comment 5: At line 34, you use the acronym PA - spell this out the first time you use it. If it is short for protected area, it may be worth keeping the terminology consistent, using Nature reserves.
Response 5: Agreed. We changed PA into NR throughout the paper.
Comment 6: Line 94, the reference Messick & Kramer is not in the reference list.
Response 6: Agreed. We added this reference in the reference list.
Comment 7: Line 217 the reference 'Guido [35]' should actually be Möllering; Guido is his first name.
Response 7: Agreed. We changed the reference.
We trust our responses have adequately addressed your comments. Please let us know if further changes or clarifications are needed.
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
I would like to thank the authors for their attention to the previous comments. I still have a number of suggestions that I think are needed.
- The description and discussion of trust is still at a very coarse level throughout the manuscript. There are so many nuances with respect to trust that it is not really feasible to go into them in one paper, but they need to be acknowledged.
- With respect to interviewing households, were only the head of households interviewed or were all members of the household? If all members, how likely/unlikely were they potentially influenced in their responses if the rest of their family were present?
- Line 111 - Where does the expectation of fairness and cooperation come from? I think that a reference is needed here.
- Footnote 1 - while I thank you for including my comment in here to distinguish your conception of institutional trust, I don't think that it is appropriate to attribute it to a reviewer. I would like to see it re-phrased with an appropriate reference or references.
- The theoretical framework is quite simplistic, and I feel that there are more factors at play than trust, particularly around "Restricting environmental destructive behaviours", e.g. social norms. Need some acknowledgement of other potential factors.
- I wonder why you chose a 5 point likert scale? Usually these are used for things that are very discrete, whereas trust is not that discrete. (I would have likely used a 10 point sliding scale)
- Overall, while I commend this study, there needs to be much more clarity around the limitations of the study (e.g. stated preferences, choice of likert scale, other factors that interact or are at play other than trust).
Author Response
We sincerely appreciate the comments from the reviewers. We have itemized the comments and addressed them individually as follows.
Reviewer #2
Comment 1: The description and discussion of trust is still at a very coarse level throughout the manuscript. There are so many nuances with respect to trust that it is not really feasible to go into them in one paper, but they need to be acknowledged.
Response 1: Agreed. In the last paragraph of Conclusions and Policy Implications, we mentioned the limitation of dividing social trust into interpersonal and institutional trust, as follow
“This study has some limitations that need further attention. First, the concept of interpersonal and institutional trust used in this study are not unanimous in literatures, even though we descripted the difference between them and their potential impact mechanisms on respondents’ attitudes, our findings need to be interpreted with caution.”
Comment 2: With respect to interviewing households, were only the head of households interviewed or were all members of the household? If all members, how likely/unlikely were they potentially influenced in their responses if the rest of their family were present?
Response 2: The household heads were the main target of the interview. In the absence of the house-hold heads, their spouses or adults over 18 years were interviewed. The respondents gives their answers on their own rather than the whole family.
Comment 3: Line 111 - Where does the expectation of fairness and cooperation come from? I think that a reference is needed here.
Response 3: Agreed. We added two references.
Comment 4: Footnote 1 - while I thank you for including my comment in here to distinguish your conception of institutional trust, I don't think that it is appropriate to attribute it to a reviewer. I would like to see it re-phrased with an appropriate reference or references.
Response 4: Agreed. We re-phrased the sentences and added some references, as follow
“In relevant literatures, there are at least two views of institutional trust - one that institutional trust is a 'generalized' type of interpersonal trust, namely we trust the people that are at the interface of a particular institution, and the other is the more intrinsic trust, where the institutions and the way they operate meet our expectations, therefore we trust them[25-26,29]. In this paper, institutional trust refers to the second definition.”
Comment 5: The theoretical framework is quite simplistic, and I feel that there are more factors at play than trust, particularly around "Restricting environmental destructive behaviours", e.g. social norms. Need some acknowledgement of other potential factors.
Response 5: Agreed. The social norms are crucial for rural households’ environmental behaviors, and the social trust are important for households obeying these social norms, we rewrote the sentences as follow
“Social norms and moral constraints are crucial for restricting rural households’ environ-mental destructive behaviors, while the interpersonal trust serves as an informal rule that guides people to abide by approved behaviors through social norms [22]. Local residents tend to comply with rather than violate these social norms [39].”
Comment 6: I wonder why you chose a 5 point likert scale? Usually these are used for things that are very discrete, whereas trust is not that discrete. (I would have likely used a 10 point sliding scale)
Response 6: Considering that most rural households in China are not well educated, hence 10 point scale is too difficult for them to answer their trust level, instead, we used 5 point scale. We found some relevant literatures also used the 5 point likert scale to measure social trust, and we added the references in the text, as follow
“Following previous studies [36, 45], for each category, the options for take the form of a Likert scale, from very distrustful to very trustful, with values of 1-5, respectively.”
Comment 7: Overall, while I commend this study, there needs to be much more clarity around the limitations of the study (e.g. stated preferences, choice of likert scale, other factors that interact or are at play other than trust).
Response 7: Agreed. We rewrote our limitation in the last paragraph of the whole paper from three aspect, including the inconsistent concept of interpersonal and institutional trust, the choice of stated social trust using likert scale and the potential missing variable problems, as follow
“This study has some limitations that need further attention. First, the concept of interpersonal and institutional trust used in this study are not unanimous in literatures, even though we descripted the difference between them and their potential impact mechanisms on respondents’ attitudes, our findings need to be interpreted with caution. Furthermore, this study measured trust in questionnaires based on 5 point Likert scale, which might not accurately reflect the respondents’ real trust propensity, the realistic environment and local social norms would affect their answers. Further analysis could combined economic experiment methods with questionnaire survey to measure trust more accurately. Finally, although this study examined the robustness of results in two ways, the potential endogeneity has not been considered. There might be some unobserved factors both affect social trust and conservation attitudes.”
We trust our responses have adequately addressed your comments. Please let us know if further changes or clarifications are needed.
Best regards,
Round 3
Reviewer 2 Report
Thank you for your revisions.
The insertions about the limitations of the study at the very end are welcome, however, I believe that this should also be made very clear in the introduction, possibly in conjunction with setting out your very narrow aim/research question.
The very brief addition about social norms - I don't feel that this is adequate. First, the way it is written, actually suggests that social norms are a key factor in people's attitudes towards conservation, and that social trust is secondary. Second, I don't feel that two sentences are sufficient discussion of the interplay between social norms and trust. Third, what other factors are at play? I am not going to provide any examples, simply because when I do, you only use the examples I provide. You need to delve much deeper into the literature.
I feel that a significant amount of further theoretical research and understanding needs to take place before this can be published.
