Risk management in the public sector: a review of the international literature

Abstract

The public sector today faces a variety of complex and challenging events, and appropriate measures are needed to ensure that the perceived public value is maintained at certain levels. However, there is a gap in the literature regarding risk management in the public sector. There is no well-established theoretical background for strategic risk management in the public sector and most of the available literature focuses only on risk estimation and fails to contribute more to how these estimates can be introduced into the decision-making process at the authorities public services. This work, an exploratory study with a qualitative approach, aimed to understand how international literature has approached risk management in the public sector. For this purpose, ProKnow-C was used as an instrument for selection of the bibliographic portfolio and systemic analysis according to the constructivist theoretical affiliation of performance evaluation. From the secondary data identified the existence, in the period from 2010 to 2020, of 25 publications that represent the fragment of the literature of interest, and the results obtained allowed the identification of research gaps and promote future research directions by not identifying methods that consider the particularities of the context of risk management in the public sector.