The state of local governance and public finance in disaster risk research: A structural topic modelling analysis

Effective disaster risk reduction (DRR) policy requires combining technical risk assessment with fiscal capacity and institutional coordination. DRR is a practical field that aims to generate actionable knowledge to mitigate the harmful effects of natural hazards. What is emphasized in indexed scholarship shapes which mechanisms are normalized, taught, and prioritized. If governance and public finance mechanisms are essential for implementation yet underemphasized, this may affect their integration into research and practice. However, their representation in indexed DRR scholarship has not been systematically measured. To this end, we apply Structural Topic Modeling to 4,568 Web of Science abstracts (1990–2024) to identify 15 latent topics and analyze how their expected proportions vary with publication year, citation count, and disciplinary domain. Three patterns emerge. First, governance and public finance topics account for approximately 20.3% of the total abstract corpus, whereas urban planning and risk assessment topics account for 65.4%. Second, documents published in recent years tend to show lower expected proportions of governance and finance topics. Third, higher-citation documents also tend to have lower expected proportions of these topics. The topic “Local Government Finance” highlights this tension: it shows high expected proportions in Economics and Business and Urban Studies and Infrastructure outlets, yet its emphasis declines over time and is negatively associated with citations. These estimates describe scholarly focus, not actual governance results. The findings suggest that DRR research would benefit from greater emphasis on governance and public finance.