Scoping review: understanding the barriers and drivers of risk management in local governments

Purpose This paper aims to provide scholars with a deep understanding of the field through the identification of strengths and weaknesses in the literature and support decision-makers in the development of new practices in local risk management based on scientific data. The specific question in this review asks: what are the drivers and barriers to local risk management? Design/methodology/approach This paper provides an overview of the scientific literature produce over the past 20 years of the divers and barriers to local risk management. This paper presents a scoping review of peer-reviewed articles published between 2000 and 2019 inclusively in the fields of public policy and public administration. Findings This paper makes three main observations regarding the state of the literature. First, this paper finds that scholars mainly focus on single risk and certain regions of the world. Second, there is multiple approached used by the literature to study risk management at the local level. Third, little attention is given to the political context in which local risk management takes place. Originality/value This paper is a complete literature review of more than 500 peer-reviewed articles published in academic journals regarding risk prevention policies over the past two decades. This paper analyzed the main findings of the current literature to provide a general view of the scholarship and improve the collective understanding of risk management at the local level by providing future research avenues.