Business Continuity Management in Public Sector Organizations: Development, Challenges, and Ways Forward

Business Continuity Management (BCM) is an approach aimed at ensuring the continued delivery of essential functions during crises. While BCM originates from the private sector, it has increasingly also been adopted by public sector organizations. Yet, no comprehensive overview of peer-reviewed literature on public sector BCM and its largely equivalent counterpart, Continuity of Operations Planning (COOP), has been conducted to explore the status of current research and identify avenues for future studies. This paper presents a scoping review of public sector BCM, examining the development of this approach, factors affecting its implementation, its current maturity, and remaining challenges. The findings reveal a limited but growing scholarly interest, with the COVID-19 pandemic significantly increasing attention to public sector BCM. The review highlights key factors influencing BCM implementation, including leadership support, organizational commitment, and training, as well as challenges such as the complexity of multi-stakeholder collaboration and resource constraints. While the literature often points to low BCM maturity within public sector organizations, it also indicates steady progress. Several implications for researchers and practitioners are identified. Public sector organizations play an essential role in multi-stakeholder collaborations aimed at strengthening continuity of operations across entire communities, and further studies are needed to better understand the implementation of BCM in such multi-actor contexts. Moreover, a research gap relates to how public sector organizations can overcome inherent limitations of BCM. In particular, research is needed to complement BCM with adaptive strategies to support organizations' adaptive capacity in the face of complexity and uncertainty characterizing contemporary crises.