Global trends in sustainable livelihood research (1988-2025)
Abstract
Sustainable livelihood has emerged as a key analytical and policy-oriented concept for addressing poverty, vulnerability, and sustainability challenges in developing and developed contexts alike. However, existing bibliometric studies on this field remain fragmented, often limited in temporal scope, dataset size, or depth of thematic and network analysis. This study provides a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of global research on sustainable livelihoods published between 1988 and 2025, drawing on 637 peer-reviewed articles indexed in the Scopus database. The results reveal a pronounced growth in scholarly output, particularly after 2016, indicating a transition from early poverty-oriented analyses toward a more interdisciplinary research agenda closely linked to climate change, resilience, and the Sustainable Development Goals. The United Kingdom and the United States emerge as central contributors to theoretical and methodological development, while countries in Asia and Africa play a key role in empirical research, reflecting the policy-relevant and practice-oriented nature of sustainable livelihood studies. Keyword co-occurrence analysis identifies five major research themes, with sustainable livelihood, livelihood, and sustainability forming the conceptual core of the knowledge structure. Overlay visualization further highlights a temporal shift from early emphases on poverty alleviation and rural economies toward integrated approaches focusing on livelihood diversification, livelihood capitals, resilience, and climate adaptation. This study also contributes by systematically mapping the evolution of thematic clusters and identifying emerging research frontiers, thereby providing a clearer direction for future interdisciplinary research. Despite its dynamic expansion, the field remains characterized by geographic imbalances and limited longitudinal and impact-based evidence. These findings underscore the need for more context-sensitive, comparative, and long-term empirical studies to strengthen the policy relevance and global applicability of sustainable livelihood research.