Scientific Coverage in Water Governance: Systematic Analysis

Abstract

In this article, the results of the bibliometric analysis applied to research on “Water Governance” are presented in order to observe behavior patterns in the key areas of this field of knowledge (progression, most productive authors, etc.). This research is complemented with a co-citation analysis. When considering two databases, a comparative study is carried out between both databases through coverage, overlap, dispersion, or concentration indicators. The results indicate that this area of knowledge has evolved rapidly and has gained popularity and importance among researchers, especially since 2009, when the real boom of the discipline took place, with about two-thirds of the papers being published in the last five years. The main authors, the most relevant articles based on the citation criterion, the institutions, and countries with the highest number of investigations and the journals where this topic is published are also identified. Scopus is the database that performs better coverage by collecting a higher number of articles and obtaining a greater number of citations.

Governance of alluvial aquifers and community participation: a social-ecological systems analysis of the Brazilian semi-arid region

“…Climate change is expected to be a "poverty multiplier", with impacts on agriculture being one of the main drivers "to force more than 3 million to 16 million people into extreme poverty" (Hoegh-Guldberg et al 2018, p. 244) and part of this is due to increased risk of water scarcity. However, recent research has argued that water scarcity in many areas is much more a water governance issue than a biophysical one (Pahl-Wostl and Kranz 2010;OECD 2011;Silva et al 2015), focusing the attention of the scientific community and decision makers on analysing how to improve the governance of water systems (Tan et al 2012;Durán-Sánchez et al 2019 ;OECD 2015).…”