The Impact of Organizational Support, Environmental Health Literacy on Farmers’ Willingness to Participate in Rural Living Environment Improvement in China: Exploratory Analysis Based on a PLS-SEM Model

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Authors should check typos and minor spelling errors.

Better presentation should exist between statistical results analysis in tables and text. An update at relative some references should exist replaced by new ones. Future research outcomes should be presented better for research development extensins of current presented working study.  Authors should check similarity to be reduced less than 4% for next sources. Sources

1 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343847702_Analyzing_government_role_in_rural_tourism_developme

nt_An_empirical_investigation_from_China

INTERNET

7%

2 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257342615_Farmers'_willingness_to_provide_ecosystem_services_and_

effects_of_their_spatial_distribution

INTERNET

6%

3 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359234617_What_Drives_Farmers_to_Participate_in_Rural_Environmen

tal_Governance_Evidence_from_Villages_in_Sandu_Town_Eastern_China

INTERNET

5%

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

The topic of the paper is very interesting, but certain aspects should be improved: 1. The topic must be framed in the wider context of postproductivism in rural societies, and in rural China also. See clive potter, and robison literature, and other geographical scholars 2. It is necessary to justify the choice of the case study. 3. It is necessary to include a location map. 4. review the conclusions in the framework of post-productivism and the particularities of the Chinese model in the global context.

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

The presented work deals with the Impact of Organizational Support Environmental Health Literacy on Farmers' Willingness to take part in Rural Living Environment Improvement. This is an important topical issue with the potential to contribute to improving policies in this area.

I particularly appreciate the comprehensive set of recommendations for government and municipal policies resulting from the results of the study.

The results and conclusions are well formulated and have the potential to allow for determining strategic decisions for the further development of rural areas in China. The developed recommendations can contribute to improving the quality of planning and forecasting activities of policymakers.

 

I recommend the article for publication.

Author Response

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Reviewer 4 Report

This is an interesting article on a pilot study regarding motivations for collective action in villages in China, using structural equation models to determine what internal and external factors contribute to collective action (‘willingness to participate’) for environmental improvement.

However, the article can be significantly improved on a number of points.

First, it does not sufficiently include international literature on rural collectives and collective work, e.g. literature on rural cooperatives. I do believe that national literature is important and interesting to develop a sufficiently adapted national level case study; but such a case study needs to be more properly situated in the international literature and against case studies in other countries.

As for the national embeddedness of the case study, I believe the reader should receive some background on the historical emergence of individualism and state-household relations in the Chinese countryside to understand current farmer’s household participation. In particular, the consequences of the 1980s agrarian reforms which disbanded cooperatives and introduced the ‘household responsibility system’, as well as the agrarian consequences of China’s WTO accession need to be spelled out.

In terms of theoretical elaboration of the research question, the following questions emerged when reading the article:

H1b & H1c are hypotheses which are formulated in a way that is hard to test as it does not spell out a clear direction of influence. As structural equation models do not as such reveal causality, a clear theoretical causality needs to be spelled out. As both options are supported by different tendencies, why not split this hypothesis into two counteracting, individually testable tendencies, instead of one without direction?

The operationalization of ‘emotional support’ needs to be clarified further. Why call this ‘emotional’? In the literature reviewed, nor in the operationalization of this concept, ‘emotions’ seem to play a strong role. The focus seems to lie on (perceived) institutional and procedural fairness.

The theory on Environmental Health Literacy overly emphasizes government & village cadre influence. But what about personal & collective experiences, which have always guided peasant understandings of their relation to the environment? What about public and social media as a source of information?

 

Data

1)     Case study selection needs to be legitimated more in detail. Why these Counties/Districts, in these provinces? Inside the county/district, the sample selection is better laid out.

2)     Little information about data collection and how that might affect the validity of the data. Who was involved in the data collection, what was the positionality of these people? How were households contacted? Did the village cadres play a mediating role, and how did that potentially affect the answers of the repondents? Who did you interview in the household, how many men, how many women, and how was the gender distribution across the different case study areas?

3)     Operationalisation to indicators:

You based your measurement of EHL on a scale used in a “Chinese Citizens’ Environmental Health Literacy trial”, but adapted it. What changed and why? As for the attribution to the latent variables, you do discuss the correlation/indicator loading of each measured variable with the latent variable/dimension of EHL to which you theoretically attributed it (table 2), but do not compare these to their loading with the other EHL-dimensions. Did you check whether some of the measured variables do not contribute stronger to the other dimensions? The same question goes for the variables measuring emotional & instrumental support (same table). 

The analysis (e.g. p. 12) would be stronger if hypotheses of alternative directions of causation would be discussed too. 

 In general the writing style is good, but there are still some grammar and spelling errors and crooked sentence here and there that need to be checked. Also the use of acronyms is not always consistent (e.g. PW vs. WP)

Author Response

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