Good governance literature: a bibliometric mapping of themes, trends, and influential contributions

Abstract

This article maps the intellectual structure and thematic evolution of the literature explicitly labelled as “good governance”. Although governance scholarship spans public administration, development, sustainability, and digital transformation, its cross-domain configuration remains unclear. The article clarifies how this corpus has evolved and how fragmented streams have integrated conceptually. A bibliometric and science-mapping design was applied to 1,609 peer-reviewed Scopus articles published between 1991 and 2026. The analysis combined performance indicators, highly cited documents, author-keyword co-occurrence, clustering, and temporal overlay visualisation using a PRISMA-style workflow, OpenRefine harmonisation, and VOSviewer mapping. Good governance research has matured into a field marked by sustained growth, thematic diversification, and patterned fragmentation. Four dominant configurations structure it: macro-institutional and development-oriented governance; administrative reform and mechanisms; legitimacy, participation, and citizen-state relations; and corporate governance and accountability. Temporal analysis shows a shift from foundational concerns to operational themes, including digital, sustainability, crisis-responsive, and AI-related governance. This study covers only Scopus-indexed, peer-reviewed articles that use the term “good governance” in the title. This prioritises conceptual centrality and replicability but may exclude literature that uses alternative terms. Therefore, the findings map the self-labelled corpus. This mapping offers a mechanism-specific basis for reform: regulatory quality and corruption control for macro-institutional problems; transparency and digital services for administrative performance; participation and trust-building for legitimacy; and board oversight for organisational accountability. This article integrates performance analysis, keyword co-occurrence, overlay visualisation, and conceptual synthesis into a novel cross-level framework that links institutional conditioning, administrative instrumentation, legitimacy formation, and organisational accountability.