How do the social sciences approach wicked resource nexus problems? A bibliometric review

Abstract

Environmental scholars have increasingly emphasized the role of the social sciences in addressing wicked resource nexus problems. Special attention is put on the role of policy and governance in dealing holistically with the conflicts, complexities, and uncertainties that emerge when managing resource-based sectors such as water, energy, and food. However, there is little knowledge about how this specific research area of social science-related wicked resource nexus research is characterized. Based on a bibliometric approach, we analyze (i) how the social sciences address different dimensions of wicked resource nexus problems, (ii) which specific topics this literature deals with, and (iii) how this literature is distributed over time and space. Overall, we find that the call of environmental scholars for holistic approaches has only partly been translated into the research practice. First, there is little integration in the identified dataset, going back to the dominance of individual keywords such as water or energy and only partly integrated clusters within and between dimensions. Second, there is a rather high dispersion of topics, which crystallizes among other things through a particularly high number of keywords mentioned less than five times. Third, while there is a starkly increasing diffusion of respective research over time, regional foci in Northern American and European research contexts rather persist. Based on these results, we provide potential avenues for future social science research in the field of wicked resource nexus problems.