Sustainable Local Development: An Overview of the State of Knowledge

Abstract

Since the eighties, the concern for sustainability has been increasing from several dimensions and depending on different socio-economic, political, geographical and cultural factors. In the last few years, local development has incorporated the concept of sustainability, as part of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals strategy, highlighting the relevance of this process. The purpose of this research is to show the state of the art of this subject, for what a bibliometric analysis has been carried out based on the two most important online databases: Web of Science and Scopus. This article identifies the latest trends that characterize the concept of sustainable local development, where resilience is the new perspective to include in the variables that influence the development of territories. The results show a positive trend in this field of research, with both the number of articles published and citations increasing exponentially in the last ten years. In addition, the analysis of keywords has shown a tendency towards terms such as resilience, rural tourism or ecological agriculture. In essence, the concept has reached such a point that it is necessary to establish new mechanisms that soften and even negate the economic disruption caused by globalization.