The “Adaptation Paradox” and Citizen Ambiguity over Government Climate Policies: Survey Findings from Bangladesh

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I think there is a lot of valuable information in this paper; however, I feel that some changes need to be made to strengthen its quality. First a thorough edit should be made as there are a number of typos throughout the paper. I struggled at times to follow the methodology, and I had difficulty understanding how the authors could make the conclusions they made, based on the methods. Some times it felt like the methods section was so vast - it was difficult to comprehend exactly what the authors did. They gathered a lot of information and I feel it needs to be more succinctly explained. 

More specific comments include: 

 

Lines 101-102 - source Ostrom’s article Line 149: only three present of 1700 - should be per cent? Lines 248-276: This is actually results - it is not methods. 292: Even though? If respondents have more trust in local government it seems logical that they would think that local government is doing a better job. That adds up. 295-296: , but that they do not distinguish among different  levels of government with respect to responsibility for addressing climate change. Where does this fit in? I think they are trying to that National government as the actor in climate change does not resonate with most people who support local government as the more reliable actor. This section just needs to be reworded.  Table 1: I find the question “Who is responsible for climate change?” vague. Do they mean “Who is responsible for causing climate change?” (because the next question "who is responsible for solving climate change?” addresses who is responsible for fixing the problem).  Does the third question “Is X doing a good job overall?” I assume this means literally overall - not overall on just climate action? 322-323: "Individuals expressing trust in local government also tended to express trust  in national government” - all through the paper up to this point the authors have stated that respondents expressed greater trust in local government than national governments (including in the abstract). 381-383: “In general do you think your ‘mayor’ or ‘Upazila chair’ [county] listens to people like  you (37 percent answered “yes”)?” and (iii) “In general, do you think your ‘Union Chair’  [mayor] listens to people like you (41 percent answered “yes”)?” What is the difference between the mayors asked in these two questions? That’s not clear. Is one a local mayor and the other district?  428-429: as mentioned above throughout the text the authors write that  trust in national government was lower than in local government. Yet lines 322-323 state otherwise.  462-467: Did the authors conduct any other research to see if this is true? Did they search any media reports or articles that indicate the Government’s official stance on this? Bangladesh has a strong presence at COP meetings. I find it hard to believe that this is the case, and it is only supported by the opinion of one of the study participants. 

Author Response

Revisions of “Levels of Governance and Accountability for Climate Adaptation: Lessons from a National Survey in Bangladesh” – now titled “The ‘Adaptation Paradox’ and Citizen Ambiguity Over Gov-ernment Climate Policies: Survey Findings from Bangladesh”

 

We thank the reviewers and have made several important changes:

• Improved the argument by considering that survey respondents may have negative but significant views about the role local government should play because they do not consider Upizalas and Unions to be local government (indeed these institutions are embedded in local communities in a manner the abstract of “government” is not. Construal theory (cited in the paper) conveys that in a psychological sense, people address more distant objects as more abstract. The concepts of government and climate change are abstract, whereas their Upizala representatives are close to home. We raised this point several times.
• Extended the argument more throughout the paper with better transitions and integration of the argument, especially in a revised conclusion.
• Fixed a range of typos, typesetting errors, and other mistakes that had appeared in the work.
• Rechecked the sources, eliminating many.

 

More specifically, by reviewers, we addressed the following:

 

To Reviewer 1’s points, I believe we addressed all of them. We made the line corrections sought and drew a better discintction between Upizala and Union leaders (local government, but we believe, perceived really as community) and the higher levels of government. We hope to have addressed the confusion. 

Reviewer 2 Report

Reviewing the study is interesting. Please take into account the two remarks discussed below.

1. My doubts are raised by the representativeness of the research sample. First of all, I believe that its number is too small. It is necessary to scientifically convince the reader that such a number is sufficient. Secondly, I believe that its stratification must be disclosed. According to what criteria important from the point of view of the research objectives were the participants selected?

2. The article must prove that such research makes sense at all. What is the advantage of knowing what ordinary people think about the culprits of climate change, and what they think about who/how should respond to it? Do respondents have deep knowledge of this topic? If not, what is the scientific value of knowing what people who are unfamiliar with the issues they talk about think?

Author Response

Revisions of “Levels of Governance and Accountability for Climate Adaptation: Lessons from a National Survey in Bangladesh” – now titled “The ‘Adaptation Paradox’ and Citizen Ambiguity Over Gov-ernment Climate Policies: Survey Findings from Bangladesh”

 

We thank the reviewers and have made several important changes:

• Improved the argument by considering that survey respondents may have negative but significant views about the role local government should play because they do not consider Upizalas and Unions to be local government (indeed these institutions are embedded in local communities in a manner the abstract of “government” is not. Construal theory (cited in the paper) conveys that in a psychological sense, people address more distant objects as more abstract. The concepts of government and climate change are abstract, whereas their Upizala representatives are close to home. We raised this point several times.
• Extended the argument more throughout the paper with better transitions and integration of the argument, especially in a revised conclusion.
• Fixed a range of typos, typesetting errors, and other mistakes that had appeared in the work.
• Rechecked the sources, eliminating many.

More specifically, by reviewers, we addressed the following:

Regarding Reviewer 2’s two points, we discussed why “the research makes sense at all” by arguing, especially in the conclusion, that the views of the most vulnerable were essential if governments were to plan and keep them safe.  Information about the other comment, the representativeness of the research sample, was always in Appendix 1.  But the reviewer was right to ask because there were no references in text to Appendix 1.  We added those references and a bit more about the survey’s representativeness to the main text.

Reviewer 3 Report

The article "Levels of Governance and Accountability for Climate Adaptation: Lessons from a National Survey in Bangladesh" aimed to "examine citizens' perspectives about the responsibility of different levels of government to address climate change problems, as well as their general trust and job performance ratings for different levels of government."

I strongly suggest that the authors restructure the article:

- Introduction needs to be well delimited.

- The second section is not Introduction. Could be a background

- Methodology contains excerpts from Results;

- Results contains many methodological explanations;

- Discussion is poor and needs to dialogue with international literature;

- Conclusion will need to be revised in the new version.

 

Overall, my evaluation is that the article is confusing because it does not have a well-defined and complete Methodology section. Results appear to only display the results listed in the tables. Nothing has been said about generating hypotheses and testing them in the Methodology section.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Revisions of “Levels of Governance and Accountability for Climate Adaptation: Lessons from a National Survey in Bangladesh” – now titled “The ‘Adaptation Paradox’ and Citizen Ambiguity Over Gov-ernment Climate Policies: Survey Findings from Bangladesh”

 

We thank the reviewers and have made several important changes:

• Improved the argument by considering that survey respondents may have negative but significant views about the role local government should play because they do not consider Upizalas and Unions to be local government (indeed these institutions are embedded in local communities in a manner the abstract of “government” is not. Construal theory (cited in the paper) conveys that in a psychological sense, people address more distant objects as more abstract. The concepts of government and climate change are abstract, whereas their Upizala representatives are close to home. We raised this point several times.
• Extended the argument more throughout the paper with better transitions and integration of the argument, especially in a revised conclusion.
• Fixed a range of typos, typesetting errors, and other mistakes that had appeared in the work.
• Rechecked the sources, eliminating many.

 

More specifically, by reviewers, we addressed the following:

Reviewer 3 sought changes in the presentation of the sections and better delineation of the argument and how it fit.  While we did leave a bit of what this reviewer called “results” early in the piece, those were descriptive information which we considered to be “setting the stage” for the statistical analysis which we considered to be the main “results.”  We did reword the introduction and smooth the writing of that section (and the first few paragraphs of the piece).  We then did a better job of separating and explaining the methodology (the survey) and also the results.  And we separated the “results and discussion” section from an expanded conclusion which does a better job of integrating the threads of the argument and also of calling for further research. As per Reviewer 2’s critique also, we added more of the methodology from Appendix 1 into the main text, and then referenced Appendix 1 twice to ensure that readers could access that auxiliary information.

Reviewer 4 Report

Please address these:

1. There is some chapter before introduction that is unclear and confusing, please add these parts to other section and start with introduction and follow with materials and methods, results and discussion (joint or separate) and conclusions.

2. Provide references for each applied method. E.g. survey is not the same as interview typically.

3. Provide a discussion section (joint with results or separate) with multiple references and compare your findings to previous studies.

4. In conclusions, synthesize your key findings and provide broader implications and suggest future research.

Author Response

Revisions of “Levels of Governance and Accountability for Climate Adaptation: Lessons from a National Survey in Bangladesh” – now titled “The ‘Adaptation Paradox’ and Citizen Ambiguity Over Gov-ernment Climate Policies: Survey Findings from Bangladesh”

 

We thank the reviewers and have made several important changes:

• Improved the argument by considering that survey respondents may have negative but significant views about the role local government should play because they do not consider Upizalas and Unions to be local government (indeed these institutions are embedded in local communities in a manner the abstract of “government” is not. Construal theory (cited in the paper) conveys that in a psychological sense, people address more distant objects as more abstract. The concepts of government and climate change are abstract, whereas their Upizala representatives are close to home. We raised this point several times.
• Extended the argument more throughout the paper with better transitions and integration of the argument, especially in a revised conclusion.
• Fixed a range of typos, typesetting errors, and other mistakes that had appeared in the work.
• Rechecked the sources, eliminating many.

 

To Reviewer 4’s critique, we improved the flow of the sections (clarifying the introduction, the methods, results and discussion, and conclusion).  We delineated the sections better and pointed out our four hypotheses explicitly.

We provided a range of methodological discussions for the survey; we did a few interviews to supplement the survey (and also did some archive research), but we did not feel it necessary to define the types of research.  The main “work” was done by the survey.  We sought to explain it fairly well and thus explained our findings in the “Methods” section (as well as the discussion of the Bangladesh case), and in the two appendices.

We could not compare our findings to too many previous studies (although there was one other extensive developing world survey we discussed) in terms of survey research on climate adaptation.  There are extensive studies, and we labeled the “literature review” section to clarify that we were considering past studies on polycentrism, the interaction of different levels of government. We discussed a range of sources on this issue and did conduct a standard literature review and also reviewed the scant literature on climate adaptation, especially in vulnerable countries. The conclusion is more explicit, thanks in part to Reviewer 4’s push.  We do summarize the key findings and broaden out to suggest the importance of the research and how it might by improved by future research.

We thank the reviewers as their views afforded us an important opportunity to improve the work.

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

The first section should be identified if it is Introduction (Lines 27-56).

Line 61: delete the word "loosely"

Insert title of table III, informing what mean the each *

The following paragraph should be deleted as there was no significance: "In Model III, those with greater belief in political responsiveness are also more inclined to favor government action; however, the coefficient is not statistically significant. Those who had engaged with government by voting or requesting assistance from an official site were less likely to favor government action. However, the latter finding is not statistically significant, and the former is only marginally significant".

Author Response

We accepted all three of the reviewer's comments and thank them for helping us improve the manuscript.

Reviewer 4 Report

This manuscript has been improved based on reviewer comments and provides an interesting outlook on an important topic.

Author Response

We appreciate the reviewer's assessment that we have addressed needed changes.