Participation of Local People in the Payment for Forest Environmental Services Program: A Case Study in Central Vietnam

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This study attempted to show the participation in the payment for forest environmental services program in central Vietnam. Forest environmental services have been recently more popular and more important. So, this study is very meaningful!

This study showed that people of central Vietnam have not been concerned with PFES so much. Is there any traditional, historical, and ethnological reasons? If there is, please add the explanation.  

Author Response

We sincerely appreciate your valuable comments and suggestions for our manuscript. We revised our manuscript following your comments and suggestions as follows. We used the track changes and highlighted them with a yellow highlighter in the text.

1. This study showed that people of central Vietnam have not been concerned with PFES so much. Is there any traditional, historical, and ethnological reasons? If there is, please add the explanation.

• We added some descriptions in the text (L233-234 and L249-253). In reality, local people are interested in PFES participation. According to the eligibility criteria to participate, the forest areas had to have land-use rights through the Forestland Allocation and be within the location that provides the forest ecosystem services (L206-209). In our study site (Hong Trung commune), the land was allocated to the community and local organizations. In addition, they made an additional rule and selected the participants in community meetings organized by the Community Forest Management Board (L213-216). Consequently, some local people were interested in PFES, but they could not participate because they did not have their own land to provide for the PFES program.

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors, 

thank you for your work, but in order to improve the quality of the article I wanted to make a few remarks:

1) The main question arises if 32 households surveyed (of which only 22 participated in PFES measures) from one village represent the province of Thua Thien Hue; in my opinion, the number of respondents should be much higher.

2) The study uses only the most traditional statistical methods; there is a lack of more innovative methods to solve the problem.

3) The key factor, on which authors focused, analyzing inhabitants participation of PFES programme measures is the income level of the population. But participation in an environmental measure may also depend on other important factors - education, age, previous experience in implementing environmental measures, environmental awareness. I would suggest exploring other factors as well.

4) It is also unclear according to what criteria the population is classified as poor and non-poor.

5) In table 3 it is not clear in which column are answers of poor and non-poor (the table should be corrected).

Author Response

We sincerely appreciate your valuable comments and suggestions for our manuscript. We revised our manuscript following your comments and suggestions as follows. We used the track changes and highlighted them with a blue highlighter in the text.

1. The main question arises if 32 households surveyed (of which only 22 participated in PFES measures) from one village represent the province of Thua Thien Hue; in my opinion, the number of respondents should be much higher.

• We understand your opinion on the number and the representativeness of the respondents. This paper aims to bridge the research gap on the policy ideas and implementation reality of PFES in Vietnam by case study. We selected the Y village of Hong Trung Commune in A Luoi District in Thua Thien Hue province to answer our research question. We chose A Luoi District based on two reasons (L130-140). In addition, we selected the Hong Trung Commune among 16 communes of A Luoi District and decided on the Y village following some reasons to discuss our research objectives. Therefore, we consider the 32 households have certainly representativeness even though the number is not significant. Based on your suggestion, we added some descriptions of why Y village is selected as our study site (L155-166). In addition, we described the limitation of our study regarding the number of respondents (L493-499).

 

2. The study uses only the most traditional statistical methods; there is a lack of more innovative methods to solve the problem.

• We employed traditional descriptive statistics to analyze the data in this study. Meanwhile, we understand the importance of more innovative methods such as inferential statistics. Therefore, we added the description of your suggestion as a further research challenge in the text (L500-502).

 

3. The key factor, on which authors focused, analyzing inhabitants participation of PFES programme measures is the income level of the population. But participation in an environmental measure may also depend on other important factors - education, age, previous experience in implementing environmental measures, environmental awareness. I would suggest exploring other factors as well.

• We agree with your suggestion. We added some descriptions of patterns on local participation. The equity in access and decision-making from Corbera was used for our study (L193-198). We also add the descriptions of our study limitation and those factors that should be analyzed in further research (L500-506).

 

4. It is also unclear according to what criteria the population is classified as poor and non-poor.

• In response to your comments, we added some descriptions of how we classified the villagers into poor and non-poor according to the poverty criteria (L172-178).

 

5. In table 3 it is not clear in which column are answers of poor and non-poor (the table should be corrected).

• In response to your comments, we modified Table 3 so that readers can understand which one is poor or non-poor clearly.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for your efforts. But in future I recommend to make more efforts developing a research methodology and ensuring that the results are representative.

Author Response

We highly appreciate your valuable comments to improve our manuscript. We will make further efforts to the representativeness of a case study in our next paper following your recommendation.