Mapping the Energy Efficiency–Sustainability–Resilience Nexus: A Conceptual Framework

Global energy progress requires simultaneous progress across three essential dimensions: energy efficiency, sustainability and systems resilience. While these concepts are frequently debated in policy and the academic world, this is done mainly as standalone subjects, and their structural interdependencies are often misunderstood, leading to fragmented interventions and poor capital allocation. This paper addresses this gap by building a 3 × 3 conceptual framework in which the literature-based criteria are assigned to each of the three dimensions: energy efficiency, sustainability and systems resilience (EE-S-R). This is done with the aid of a bibliometric analysis of articles retrieved from the Dimensions database in the last 10 years (2016–2025) and processed in VOSviewer, yielding 610 articles and producing 93 candidate terms. The conceptual framework was developed on theoretical grounds and refined through bibliometric analysis, in which a three-criterion selection protocol combining a composite bibliometric indicator with the nexus relevance and conceptual distinctiveness criteria produces nine umbrella components distributed across the three EE-S-R thematic dimensions. The resulting ternary conceptual framework constitutes a grounded methodology to be further used in research or policy design as an important framework for complex multi-criteria decision making that cuts across engineering, governance, environmental science and urban planning.