The Development of Policy Analysis about Carbon Neutrality: A Bibliometric Review

Abstract

Carbon neutrality has already become global vision, aiming at the low-carbon transition of society to avert catastrophic climate change. Responding to this objective, government, as the authority, needs to utilize policy instruments to steer low-carbon socioeconomic activity. Therefore, various policies are being formulated to build a comprehensive governance mechanism, followed by abundant policy research to explore various problems faced in the process of policymaking and implementation, such as how a policy works, how effective a policy is or what the breadth and depth of a relevant policy mix are. Although new research is emerging all the time, the current policy research about carbon neutrality are fragmented and context-dependent, and there lacks research to systematically review the holistic research situation in this domain. Thus, we presented an in-depth overview of the development of the policy research about carbon neutrality including its current status, research hotspots and frontiers through CiteSpace. Five problems were addressed in the review by analyzing 1,151 unique scientific articles from Web of Science: (1) What’s the spatial and temporal distribution situation of the 1,151 unique articles? (2) What’s the current dominating research theme in this research field? (3) Whether the research themes by Chinese authors in English and Chinese journals are distinct? (4) Which journals have grabbed the attention of many scholars? (5) What’s the research hotspots and frontiers of this field and what’s the current research direction?

Keywords: Policy Analysis, Carbon Neutrality, Low-carbon Transition, Bibliometric Analysis

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007902