Community Empowerment and Utilization of Renewable Energy: Entrepreneurial Perspective for Community Resilience Based on Sustainable Management of Slum Settlements in Makassar City, Indonesia

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper discusses a really important and interesting topic of the importance of community empowerment in connection with renewable energy issues.

Tha paper is well structured, using appropriate methodology and displaying the results in an attractive way.

The conclusions are supported by the results.

Methodology is a good mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods. The context is really interesting.

The text should be double-checked for misspellings and right English.

However, the literature review in a separate chapter is missing, I advise to the authors to insert it with a length of 2-3 pages.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

First of all, we thank you for the suggestions and critisism of our article. Herewith we convey a number, of things related to the revision of our article regarding the suggestions and criticisms we received, as follows:

1. Adding substance to the introduction (page 3).
2. Addition of theoretical substance to the conceptual framework section (pages 5-7).
3. Sharpening the substance of the methodology ( pages 12-17).

Once again, we thank you for the suggestions and input given.

Regards,

Author

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I have several concerns about this paper. Most of these concerns relate to methodological issues.

It is unclear if the authors want to focus on only energy sustainability or, adopting a more extensive conceptualization of sustainability, they want to focus on social, economic, and environmental sustainability.

Is empowerment to energy sustainability in slums much more important than empowerment to social and economic sustainability?

It seems that authors assume that empowerment to energy sustainability is leading to economic and social sustainability. They discuss such point in the second section. Are there any literature contribution and previous empirical studies which support this assumption?

The focus of their paper and the specific contribution should be stated.

Authors should also emphasize to what extent and how this paper contributes to literature.

Both in the introduction and methodology section the authors should present the methodology and research approach they want to implement, i.e. quantitative vs qualitative research, exploratory vs confirmatory research, etc. If they adopt a quantitative approach, they should illustrate the method before presenting results. That means illustrate variables, how these variables have been measured, if cause-effect relationships between variables have been investigated, etc. Literature support is necessary to justify the choice of variables and their measurement.

Variables have not been previously introduced. See, for instance, functions and roles of institutions.

The authors should present all variables that have been used in the questionnaire (and the model conceptualization).

The number of people that have been involved to collect data includes only 18 units. To what extent is it representative of the slums? How have these people been selected (see also the list of characteristics on page 11)? What do authors mean when they write “the number of samples” (see equation no. 1, page 11)? Usually there is only one sample. What is the research unit in this study?

In “3.4.2. Quantitative Analysis”: as I understand, there are only 18 questionnaires that have been filled in. This means that using regression analysis does not provide robust results. The utilization of the multiple regression model in Figure 4 cannot be justified. Did authors only implement correlation analysis rather than multiple regression analysis?

I do not understand Fig. 7.a.

To what extent is discussion based on empirical results?

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

First of all, we thank you for the suggestions and criticism of our article. Herewith we convey a number, of things related to the revision of our article regarding the suggestion and criticisms we received, as follows:

1. Substantial revision related to our research focus are described in the introduction (page 3)
2. We explain the addition of substance related to the theoretical study in the conceptual framework section (pages 5-7).
3. Revision and refinement  of the methodology according to our reviewer input are described in the material and method section (pages 12-17).
4. The measurement of variabel and indicators used is described in the methodology section (pages 14-15).
5. The sharpening of the substance related to the research sample with explanation: 18 people were informants selected by the snowball method while the number of sample needed in this study is described in Table 2 (page 17).
6. Our revised Figure 7A has been corrected (page 21).
7. In the conclusion section we describe the shortcomings of this study and recommendations for future studies (page 33).

Once again, we thank you for the suggestions and input given.

Regards,

Author

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have revised the manuscript accordingly.