Dealing with the Social-Ecological Obstacle: Review of Decision-Making Approaches in Marine Management

Abstract

Occupying the same crucial position as land resources, ecological resources originate from the marine system nourish various aspects of human welfare and the world economy. It is significant to apply efficient decision-making approaches, which assist with the achievements of sustainable development and environmental protection. This paper aims to review decision-making approaches in marine management and present a comprehensive bibliometric study. To achieve this goal, bibliometric analysis is used to analyze the current status and emerging trends in this field, including the cluster network, the collaboration network, and burst detection. The results show that the number of publications in this field has increased rapidly, and it has become an increasing interdisciplinary research subject. Besides, marine conservation is the largest clusterand the USA is the most productive country in marine management research and the marine policy and NOAA are the most productive journal and institution, respectively. Furthermore, “Diversity,” “Management,” and “Population” are the most influential keywords, and “People” and “Public participation” are the emerging trends in decision-making and marine management. Our work clarifies where we are now in terms of marine management and decision-making and how do they serve each other to achieve sustainable development. More importantly, some deep insights could be given that motivate researchers to learn the connections and collaborations between natural science and social study, which is our effort to deal with the social-ecological obstacle as well.