Sustainable development goals as a tool for strategic planning in communities: a bibliometric analysis of research

Abstract

Nowadays, the balanced development of any territorial unit should be based on the concept of sustainable development. As a result of its significant expansion, the goals of sustainable development began to be used at the level of strategic and operational documents, which in the context of decentralization is reflected at the level of individual territorial communities. This article is devoted to bibliometric analysis of the scientific papers from the Web of Science and Scopus, which deals with the topic of sustainable development in local communities as elements of strategic planning. To do this, we used the VOS viewer, Scopus, and Web of Science tools, which made it possible to identify major trends (for example, dynamics by year, country, authors, subject area, etc.) and clusters that visually present the obtained information. The following key parameters were also selected for the analysis: published for 1987-2019 years; the language of the paper – English; papers which contain keywords – sustainable development, local communities, and strategic planning. The results indicate a growing role of the chosen topic, which prevails in environmental and social sciences. The bibliometric analysis revealed 8 clusters (Scopus database) and 11 clusters (Vos database) with the central term “sustainable development”. The term “local communities” is also one of the key ones in the analyzed research, which is confirmed by the number and strength of links. The analyzed trends show that sustainable development is increasingly considered at the local level of territorial communities in the context of their planning and development.