Mapping the knowledge development and frontier areas of public risk governance research

Abstract

The interdisciplinary research field of public risk governance (PRG) emerged in response to the demands of integrative approaches to deal with increasingly complex and systemic public risks, providing intellectual support for policy frameworks, decision procedures, and institutional arrangements. The research on PRG expanded rapidly, deriving a wide range of interrelated concepts and theories; and growing into an arena of diverse knowledge domains. However, the disparate ontological and discoursal systems by scholars can hinder interdisciplinary dialogue, and impede practical implications. The study conducted an integrative analysis of current scholarly research to build a shared interdisciplinary ontology of PRG. A mixed-method design was employed, combining bibliographic analysis, unsupervised text-mining, and in-depth content analysis, to examine the scholarly research extracted from the Web of Science Core Collection database. The findings provided a holistic map of the PRG research across time and spatial distribution, identifying how diverse knowledge domains emerged, evolved, diffused, and integrated into the present PRG research realm. The future research agendas to which the PRG research field might move forward were also discussed.