From Risk Assessment to Procurement Decision: A Systematic Review in Construction

Risk management and procurement are established fields in construction research, but the decision chain connecting them has not been examined as an object in itself. This review asked whether exposure identified by risk analysis reaches the sourcing decision, whether that decision is fixed contractually, and whether performance data returns to the assessment. Following the PRISMA 2020 statement, one hundred and ninety-seven records were retrieved through eight structured searches, citation chaining and hand searching. After duplicate removal, screening and eligibility assessment, one hundred and thirty studies were coded against a five-stage chain comprising exposure diagnosis, analytical triage, procurement allocation, contractual fixing, and monitoring with feedback. Coverage was analysed at stage level, at span level, and as a pairwise co-occurrence matrix, with a sensitivity analysis excluding venues not indexed in Scopus. Every stage proved substantially covered, from ninety studies addressing exposure diagnosis to thirteen addressing monitoring and feedback. Adjacent transitions were far thinner. Forty-two studies linked diagnosis to analysis, but nine linked analyses to a procurement decision, nine linked procurements to the contract, and two linked the contract to monitoring. One hundred and ten studies spanned two stages or fewer, two traversed analyses through procurement into contractual terms, and none covered all five. The findings were stable across corpus sizes and insensitive to venue exclusion. The review contributes a decision-chain coding scheme, evidence that the field's central prescriptive claim rests on a narrow empirical base, and a research agenda addressing the untraversed transitions.