Social learning, public participation and community engagement in waste management: A bibliometric analysis of trends and gaps

Public participation is a key to a successful municipal waste management (MWM) system, but making it sustainable remains challenging. Social learning is one potential solution to improve and sustain public participation, as it encourages the community to become more engaged in the program through a collaborative process involving diverse actors. However, previous studies paid little attention to this topic. This study aimed to provide evidence on the development of studies on public participation and community engagement in waste management, and to further investigate the studies on social learning within collaborative systems for the public participation. It employed bibliometric analysis, utilizing the public participation ladder by Arnstein, social learning theory, and the collaborative governance model as the analytical framework. Using two tools, Visualization of Similarities viewer (VOSviewer) and Biblioshiny, this study mapped the metadata and analyzed 140 selected documents through a systematic search of the Scopus database. This study revealed some insights. First, public acceptance and identification of behavioral determinant factors have been a consistent main topic of studies, especially in developing countries, indicating a low level of participation as the focus of prior studies. In contrast, an active partnership with the government and other stakeholders throughout the planning and decision-making processes is expected to be the primary focus. Second, only a limited number of studies on waste management have analyzed the collaborative dynamic interaction and social learning process more closely in developed country contexts. Studies on other crucial aspects of collaborative governance, such as organizational design and facilitative leadership, are also lacking, despite their importance for social learning in collaborative governance. More comprehensive studies were required to be explored in future studies, including the starting conditions as an enabler of the collaborative process. This study is a novel investigation that employs a bibliometric analysis to visualize the growth of studies in the public participation context of waste management. The findings contribute, both theoretically and practically, in waste management field by providing future research directions and offering insights for policymakers, NGOs, and other relevant stakeholders to develop collaborative strategies that enhance public participation sustainability.