Governing the environment, influencing the public: a bibliometric study and review of regulation and environmental perception

Abstract

This study visualizes Scopus indexed open-access publications in the areas of environmental regulation and perception for the period between 2000 and 2025, and makes sense of their intellectual structure through the lens of governance-perception-legitimacy. A total of 13,100 records constituted the final corpus. Both performance analysis and VOSviewer science mapping were used to explore publications growth, collaboration, bibliographic coupling, source citation, and author-keyword networks. The Literature on environmental regulation and perception increased rapidly since 2016, and this Literature is biased towards sustainability and energy journals as well as in China, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Western Europe. The work is organized around four closely related subject clusters: Regulatory Reform and Innovation; ESG and Corporate Social Responsibility; Digital Governance and Public Participation; and Justice- Oriented Scholarship. Their interplay shows how the study of the topic has shifted from being viewed as one concerned primarily with technical or legal instruments toward an emphasis on the notion of a governance process in which the viability and enduring value of environmental regulation must reflect perceptions about its effectiveness, fairness, trust, accountability and meaningfully engagement. However, evidence for geographic and outlet asymmetry implies that the pool from which the currently prominent interpretations of legitimacy and compliance arise may be limited. From the perspective of public administration, the present results show transparency and meaningful engagement are most influential where and when they can be associated with clear policy implementation, readily available evidence of administrative respondability, and verified policy outcomes. When formal policy is embodied into tangible, accessible, and procedural responsive governance, environmental regulation is more expected to sustain publics support.