Beyond “Community-Washing”: Effective and Sustained Community Collaboration in Urban Waterways Management

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper focuses on an important and interesting research problem:  how to understand the common failure of government efforts to collaborate with communities in the conservation and development projects and programs, defined by the authors as the “intention-implementation” gap.  The study focused on two case studies of urban waterways management in Melbourne, carrying out 23 semi-structured interviews with different stakeholders involved in these management efforts to hear their perspectives on their experiences and on community collaboration, their views on factors that hinder or enable collaboration, and possible future changes to improve collaboration.  Their findings confirm the gap between intention and implementation and provide examples of many different factors that contribute to this gap and how to bridge it.

 

I struggled to understand the structure and key points in this paper, and I detail some of the problems below.  These include: the introduction of too many analytical frameworks, most of which are not adequately explained; lack of key details about methodologies used; and unclear statements of the findings, including confusing figures and wordy/unclear language.  The authors could benefit from a deeper dive into the broader literature on environmental governance and communities to help focus their analysis and build on work already carried out that focuses on key issues such as power differentials in environmental governance with communities, and how this consistently poses difficulties for community collaboration.  The authors need to revise the paper’s focus and approach by following through with using consistent concepts through the data analysis steps to the findings and discussion of what the two case studies contribute to our knowledge on this issue.  A well-structured comparison of the two cases using a consistent framework of concepts and interpretation would allow them to clearly show the value and utility of their approach.

 

1.      Too Many Frameworks

 

The authors introduce a series of different frameworks and key concepts whose meaning and application are not always adequately spelled out.  The conceptual framework needs to be explicitly deployed to address the research question and guide the specific analytical steps and categories.  Too often, however, this is unclear, and becomes distracting from the logic of the authors’ arguments.  Throughout the paper, the authors refer to VRK; Constructivist Grounded Theory; IAP (International Association for Public Participation); and Power-Interest Matrix, as well as key concepts not discussed such as “fit-for-purpose.” Only the VRK framework is actually discussed, and it’s not clear how the other frameworks are used and contribute to the analysis.

 

The VRK (Values-Rules-Knowledge) is the framework discussed most consistently, in the introduction (line 165), and it builds on the relevant literature.  (The sentence in line 165 awkwardly states that the VRK Framework “used this study” when in fact the authors used the framework for their study).  But the explanation for precisely how the framework was used is difficult to follow.  Line 173 says it is used to understand “why, from the community perspective, does community collaborate in developing management actions with government agencies (Values)” –when in fact the VRK framework emphasizes understanding the diversity of values and knowledge systems.  The authors also state that “we analysed how different methods and capacities, i.e. human, social, and financial capitals, (Knowledge) could enable or hinder effective community participation,” seemingly equating knowledge with different forms of capitals, but that language (capitals) does not appear again in the paper.  Knowledge is not the same as capitals. 

 

Lines 515-517: “One of the main impediments highlighted from the empirical data was that the expectations have not been decided collaboratively, due to the loss of the community agency and power in decision-making, which misaligned with the over-all waterways management goal (Values), which is healthy waterways for all.”  And again in lines 598-99 the authors state: “Analysis revealed a critical need for the community to change their behaviour, norms (Rules) and Knowledge to align with common Values. Findings support this argument by indicating a lack of Knowledge, awareness, desire and ownership of achieving common Values…”  These statements focus on “common values” rather than the diverse values recognized by the VRK framework, and imply that the values of the government resource managers constitute these “common values” because they presumably benefit all.  Common values and “fit-for-common-purpose” are mentioned again in line 627, with no critical reflection of the meaning. This seems to be a misreading of the VRK framework with its understanding of diverse values and knowledges.  In fact, the bolded portion of the first statement cited above explicitly recognizes that the underlying problem is the loss of community agency and power in decision-making.  Yet the authors do not analyze power differences at all, nor cite the literature that has focused on this key underlying factor.

 

Finally, the “reframing” proposed in the literature on VRK spells out an iterative process for adaptation in a specific decision-making context, but the authors instead provide some general recommendations – without drawing any specific lessons from comparing processes in the two cases studied.

 

2.      Methods Details

 

The methodology discussion needs further detail in order to clarify the findings of the study. 

·       What does it mean to say that the two case studies were chosen as heterogenous but yet typical?  What was the universe of cases considered and how were these criteria operationalized?  The discussion here is very unclear.

·       How was sampling specifically carried out, and how representative were the 23 people interviewed of the whole universe of stakeholders in these cases?  What are the potential biases? 

·       More information is needed on the content of the interviews, and especially on the details of steps in coding.  What kinds of questions were asked, and how did these relate to values, rules and knowledge?  How were selective, axial, and thematic codes operationalized and combined?  Constructivist Grounded Theory is cited, but the two themes cited (evidence of intentions and of implementation; factors that constrain or enable participation) are exactly those of the researchers.  In what way was grounded theory applied in the coding process?  Were responses coded in terms of values, rules and knowledge?  Without more explicit discussion of the steps taken, we cannot understand how the findings were derived.

 

3.      Findings Unclear

 

The presentation of findings from the interviews is unclear, and appears to be ad hoc rather than systematic – or at least it’s unclear how the findings were derived (see previous section).  The two figures are interesting, but very complex, and they show elements that are not explained. 

·       In Figure 1, what are the “roles” shown in the legend, and where are they actually shown in the graph? There is no discussion of roles in the text or in the analysis.  How were the arrows defined – based on what specific interview data?  The arrows also are not discussed.

·       Figure 2 presents a list of Factors and a list of Triggers/Impacts:  these do not appear to be aligned.  Are specific triggers/impacts associated with specific factors?  The triggers/impacts are not specifically discussed, and it’s not clear how the information in this Figure was derived from the interviews.

 

The discussion of findings is often wordy and unclear, e.g. line 342-3: “This section of the findings represents a significant proportion of the common variance of the data, and several root causes characterise each factor.”  What do they mean by “common variance” and how was this measured?  How do they show the root causes that characterize each factor?

 

Despite my keen interest in this paper, I was unable to understand the findings presented and what they contribute to the growing literature on community participation in environmental governance.  I would encourage the authors to focus and simplify their paper, and undertake a more careful analysis, ideally using a comparative approach to the two cases.

 

4.      Broader literature: POWER

 

I would also encourage the authors to consult with the broader literature on environmental governance and communities, which have found important persistent problems associated with power imbalances and reluctance/inability of governments to relinquish control.  This literature includes the work by Arun Arawal, as well as this reference on environmental governance and communities in Australia: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00049180902964926 and this study: Environmental governance: A practical framework to guide design, evaluation, and analysis https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/conl.12600. 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for very constructive and rigorous comments. It has helped us improve the manuscript, and we have tried our best to address all concerns. It has however meant that we needed to make some very major changes, and this means that large parts of the manuscript had to be rewritten. Specific responses to your comments are found in the Table attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript deals with a topic of interest to this journal. However, major revisions are needed before publication.

In detail:

- paragraphs 3.1 and 3.2 where the two case studies are described are too brief and lack quantitative information on past flood events, anthropogenic pressure effects, land use changes , etc.

- it would be useful to add a detailed list of the questions asked in the interviews, with quantitative information on the related answers

- there is no Discussion section where to compare the results obtained in this study with those obtained in similar contexts

- there are some typos such as extra spaces and the recurring phrase "Error! Reference source not found."

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for very useful comments. It has helped us improve the manuscript, and we have tried our best to address all concerns. It has however meant that we needed to make some very major changes, and this means that large parts of the manuscript had to be rewritten. Specific responses to your comments are found in the Table attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper is much improved, with greater clarity of statement of findings and comparative insights.  It reads as if written quickly, with many grammatical mistakes, but the meaning is mostly clear.  I still think the authors should acknowledge more clearly that their findings about power imbalances and government control are consistent with findings from the broader environmental governance literature:  the intention-implementation gap is not a new finding, but their case studies help to illuminate the details.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thanks for your feedback and further suggestions mentioned to improve the paper. We have addressed the two issues you raised, as explained below.

• We have corrected grammatical issues.
• We edited some of the power imbalances and government control findings and discussions corresponding to the broader environmental governance literature. 

Thanks again

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors extensively revised the manuscript and effectively responded to the reviewers' comments. So it is possible to accept the manuscript in present form.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thanks for your feedback and acceptance of the paper.

Thanks