Integrated Risk Management, a Conduit to Building Resilient and Sustainable Local Government Communities: A Scoping Review

The management of risk and its integration with business strategy (corporate plan) and performance is important to building resilient and sustainable local communities. Local Governments fulfil a series of vital roles worldwide. There has been increasing recognition of the need to implement holistic and integrated Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) approaches, given that risk is an unavoidable occurrence. At the same time, there has been a drive towards evidence-based practice, which has led to scoping reviews, a relatively new approach to the literature review. Of interest was Arksey & O’Malley’s (Int J Soc Res Methodol 8(1):19–32, 2005) framework that provided a distinctive process to follow given that ERM is a broad and multidisciplinary topic, where different organisations are applying many different risk standards. The authors used One Search and Google Scholar electronic databases and Google search engine to search for relevant studies using search terms, which resulted in 1690 studies. Some inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied to narrow the search results. 210 studies were found to be eligible to be included in the scoping review. The authors complemented the scoping review with thematic analysis of those selected studies using NVivo 12 Plus, and results were synthesised using Excel. The paper finds that only 2% of studies were published concerning risk management at Local Government levels. The paper also finds that while there has been an increase in the number of publications in ERM between 2010 and 2020, research appears to be more interested in the integration of ERM than the traditional silo approaches to managing risk. It appears risk management is a “tick in a box exercise” where risk management processes are not significantly integrated into the delivery of strategic goals that, in turn, benefits communities. Research gaps indicate the need to establish a methodology to integrate ERM with strategy and performance as three concepts in a Local Government setting.