Institutional Design and Performance of Markets for Watershed Ecosystem Services: A Systematic Literature Review
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This is a useful, well organised study deserving of publication. The revisions are sound and the overall approach is of value.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
We wish to express our appreciation for your comments.
Best regards,
Corresponding author of Manuscript 855986
Reviewer 2 Report
This is a very well-organized manuscript.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
We wish to express our appreciation for your comments.
Best regards,
Corresponding author of Manuscript 855986
Reviewer 3 Report
The topic is a very important one - that is well worthy of review and publication.
I suggest to delete the first sentence in the abstract and simplify the second one until it is easy and inviting to read. The final sentence in the abstract about findings is very very long.
The article would benefit from a more practical perspective somewhere in the introductory sections on how the insight it is providing might be used. - Who is it aimed at? How might it help them to do what? Why is it exciting, novel and likely to be useful?
Since 224 articles have been so carefully identified and analysed, could a well-organized list of them be provided?
You say as follows: 'Within the 224 articles, 181 of them embrace empirical research, which covers 268 around 445 projects (with overlaps), including existing projects and potential projects. More than 269 50% of the projects are located in Latin America and the Caribbean, and Northern America, followed 270 by and Eastern Asia and South-eastern Asia. Regions of Western Asia, Eastern Europe, Melanesia, 271 Micronesia, and Polynesia are not covered.'
-Was there nothing in Africa? Or are you assuming that you readers would not be interested in this?
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Please see the attachment. Thank you.
Best regards,
Corresponding author of Manuscript 855986
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
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
Review of “Institutional design and performance of markets for watershed ecosystem services: a systematic literature review” for Sustainability
The manuscript presents a systematic review of literature in a particular slice of the literature described in the title.
The structure and content of the article could be described as the authors mentioning in rapid sequence a range of papers with relatively minimal commentary. This collection of references is likely to be useful to specialists interested in this very narrow slice of the literature. However, it reads as if it were background for another, more interesting research project, perhaps as the first chapter of a dissertation. As such a product it may be very good. For a stand alone publication, I find it wanting more.
Overall, the body of the paper feels like a list of topics, and a grouping of literature into subjects, without much analysis or novel insights. What are the hypotheses driving this work? If it’s completely descriptive of the shape of previous literature, then justify why it’s a novel contribution and why it deserves to be in a journal article.
If the authors moved the bulk of the content of the paper as currently written into an appendix, ideally organized as a table with some useful structure, and replaced the body of the paper with their analysis not of what is in that table, but what it means, its significance for the field, and its relevance for the world.
An overarching comment is that the writing leaves much opportunity for improvement. A heavy edit for style could improve ease of reading and help clarify the messages. More substantively and importantly, the framing and arguments need to be sharpened, and likely work on the organization of the piece would help as well.
Other comments:
Line 13 – This key sentence is opaque, but crucial. Should be rewritten for clarity.
Line 28 – ES are “used”, sure, but also managed and have other, in situ benefits that don’t involve “use”, which implies human appropriation.
Line 66 - CIES vs. CICES. Define acronyms. Throughout: be careful with first use of acronyms and their definitions.
Line 82 - Could you possibly have a market for ES without government regulation? Or, how could you conceive of having one without distortion?
Line 115 – this is a strange and limiting definition of institutional design. What is an institution, in your definition, if institutional design is assignment of rights and liabilities? This needs to be refined and conceptualized. The operationalization following is better.
Line 159 – It might be worth a look at the bibliometrics literature for methodological tips, and citing to that literature would bolster the methods section. Or, to literature on systematic review methods.
Line 189 – This would seem a very very difficult exclusion to justify, or at least it’s not justified well here.
Line 203 – Likewise, these exclusions seem arbitrary and need to be more carefully articulated, at least, and justified, as they would seem to exclude potentially relevant literature.
Line 285 – This is a potentially useful table. What else can be done with this skeleton? The authors should add commentary or analysis of the differences in definitions, as well as their insights on why they exist, and what the reader should take from this diversity. Otherwise it’s just a list.
Line 482 – I don’t think any of these research questions were answered by this article. Rather, it’s a list of paper topics that other people have written about, and a list of some key conclusions of others. Neither points to key research gaps, nor does it really pull together obviously signposted original thinking. Maybe this is Chapter 1 of a dissertation - if so it could use more meat to describe what the review is meant to motivate, and why. What are the unanswered questions arising here, why are they important, which are most crucial, what do we know and not know and need to know and why?
Reviewer 2 Report
This is an interesting and worthwhile study but the paper needs revision to make the conceptual logic and expression clearer. I think with editing and revision this would make a worthwhile contribution and deserves publication.
Overall the area is worthy of this kind of examination and the kind of review could yield valuable insights but the paper would benefit from revision that attempts to strengthen the overall logic and lead to stronger conclusions.
The paper would benefit from referencing some of the critics of PES systems including for example Sullivan,
Sullivan (2013) suggests that a blizzard of calculation is blinding us to the extreme financialisation of nature and the unthinking adoption of neoliberal logics, in which natural resources, including water, are subjected to commodification, more fully appropriated for economic production including through commodification of ecosystem services (Dempsey and Robertson, 2012; Robertson, 2016; Sullivan, 2017; 2013).
Dempsey J., and Robertson M., 2012. Ecosystem services: Tensions, impurities, and points of engagement within neoliberalism. Progress in Human Geography 36(6) pp.758–
779 DOI: 10.1177/0309132512437076.
Sullivan, S., 2017. On ‘Natural Capital’, ‘Fairy Tales’ and Ideology. Development and Change 48, 397–423. doi:10.1111/dech.12293
Sullivan, S., 2013. Banking Nature? The Spectacular Financialisation of Environmental Conservation. Antipode 45, 198–217. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.00989.x
A useful reference re failures of ecosystem valuations to result in policy changes see
Y Laurans and L Mermet: ‘Ecosystem services economic valuation, decision-support system or advocacy?’. Ecosystem Services, 2014, Vol. 7 (C), 98-105
Reviewer 3 Report
The paper is asking a REALLY important set of research questions. Watershed markets will succeed or fail based on institutional design criteria.
For me, as a practitioner in the watershed markets space, the paper was really challenging to read and understand. I understood the use of Web of Science, but the theoretical framework used was weak.
The conclusions didn't tell me what I should be using to design institutions for markets.
The paper seemed to be balancing between A) A meta-analysis of the literature, and B) providing a framework for institutional design. I do not think it did either very well. For theory, I would have imagined much more attention to the institutional and organizational design literature (e.g., Koppenjan and Klijn) or the environmental markets design literature (e.g., Tripp and Dudek).
Ultimately, I didn't see a comprehensive assessment of answers to your research questions. I'd encourage you to look again to the papers to see what they tell you as a whole
