A Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) Framework Based on Scientometry for Understanding The Risk Factors in Sustainable Water Resources Management

The study of how water can be used sustainably through risk management has become increasingly complex due to the many different aspects involved. This study used a three-step approach to investigate the issue: trend analysis, bibliometric analysis, and the development of a conceptual TOE framework. The trend analysis identified water conservation and water crisis as the most frequently mentioned keywords, suggesting the need to address public concern for these issues. The bibliometric analysis found that 37% of the articles were published in the last three years, and environmental science and technology was the most common field of study. The TOE framework was used to link and group the keywords (risk factors) from the articles into three categories: technology, organization, and environment. This framework provides a way to understand the different factors that contribute to water scarcity and to develop strategies for addressing these risk factors. The three risk factors with the highest scores were statistical analysis (technology), climate change (environment), and uncertainty (environment). In the technology category, statistical analysis, sustainable development, and water quality were the most important risk factors. In the organization category, water management, governance, and water markets were the most important risk factors. In the environment category, climate change, uncertainty, and flood were the most important risk factors. This study is expected to provide valuable insights into the research trends that are important for achieving sustainability in water resource management, both in conventional and academic studies, over the past decade.


Introduction
Water is essential for life and economic development.The United Nations has included water resource management in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 due to the growing stress of water demand and limited availability, especially in remote areas (WHO 2016).
The key driving factor is the increasing water withdrawal by human activities, which has caused water stress to increase by 61.1% between 1971 and 2010 (Huang et al. 2021).In 2018, 3.6 billion people did not have adequate access to safe drinking water for at least one month globally, and this number is projected to reach 5 billion by 2050 (Adaptation 2019).This implies the difficulty of achieving sustainable water resources.
Sustainable water resources management is a concept that emphasizes meeting current and future water demands while taking into account the risks posed by climate change, infrastructure operations, and other factors (Bolson et al. 2018;Loucks 2000;Mays 2007).The increasing water demand and limited availability have made it more important to investigate and manage these risks (Deines et al. 2021;Han et al. 2023).The risk factors of sustainability, which involve the management of factors that affect an uncertain future, are more complex and far-reaching than the traditional definition of risk.All factors affecting water resources should be considered as risk factors and managed prudently and continuously (Krysiak 2009).Meanwhile, the conceptualization and composition of these risk factors are becoming increasingly complex due to the spatiotemporal evolution of technologies, organizations, and the environment (Kuzdas et al. 2016;Schismenos et al. 2021).This makes risk management a challenging task.
Previous studies have used various models including conceptual frameworks, interpretative structural modeling, and information diffusion methods to evaluate the key elements for addressing water resource management issues (Anvarifar et al. 2016;Chen et al. 2017;Jiang et al. 2019;Shortridge & Guikema 2016).Bibliometrics has been used to identify hotspots and trends in the existing literature on selected subjects (Bunclark & Hernández 2022;Rhomad et al. 2023).This helps identify the key risks and impacts that have been studied in the past, and to identify areas where further research is needed.Research leveraging big data for scientific analysis of water resources has highlighted the need for interdisciplinary research.It brings together expertise from different fields to develop more comprehensive and effective management strategies.(Gu et al. 2021;Ren et al. 2013).
The technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework is a theoretical tool that focuses on the interaction between entities rather than the behavior of individual domains.This distinguishes it from previous studies that have focused on specific topics and assessed individual behaviors such as wastewater management throughout the life cycle (Safarpour et al. 2022).The TOE framework emphasizes the assessment of technological, environmental, economic, and social factors and explains how the adoption and implementation of innovative approaches are influenced by the three contexts.The TOE framework has been used in many different research areas, and it could be an alternative to deal with the complex issues of water resource management.A study assessed potential practices to manage the urban water supply in Shanghai from the perspectives of the environment, society, economy, and institution (Zhu & Chang 2020).The South-North Water Transfer Project in China has been discussed with respect to its impacts on the environment, economy, and society (Wilson et al. 2017).Another study simultaneously considered the influences of environmental and anthropogenic factors to propose effective strategies for groundwater preservation (Bagordo et al. 2016).In the meantime, more studies have shown that the viewpoints should be represented in much more comprehensive ways.Studies on artificial water networks (Kim et al. 2014(Kim et al. , 2015)), water disasters (Vanderhorst et al. 2021), and climate change (Ferreira et al. 2020) have shown that the TOE framework can be used to understand the complex interactions between water resources, technology, organizations, and the environment.
The research on sustainable water resource management is constantly evolving, leading to the development of new approaches that utilize new technologies, partnerships between stakeholders, and environmental perspectives.To identify the latest research trends in sustainable water resource management, we conducted a scientometric study of the scientific literature.We identified and assessed the importance of keywords that are critical to this field from the perspectives of technology, organization, and environment.These keywords were further defined as risk factors and used to construct a framework for water resources risk management that revealed the critical keywords in each category, providing insights into the research highlights for sustainable water resources.
This approach has been used in other fields, such as risk management in sustainable smart city governance (Ullah et al. 2021), determining the appropriate water type and technique for enclosed agricultural production systems (Espinoza Márquez et al. 2020), and mapping knowledge domain on economic growth and water use (Bai et al. 2022).However, to the best of our knowledge, it has not been used in the field of sustainable water resource management.Therefore, we conducted a trend analysis and bibliometric analysis to conduct a more comprehensive review.This allowed us to encompass a broader spectrum of research and develop a more representative and resilient multilayer TOE framework for risk management.Risk management was defined as the identification of the variables that increase the risk of water sustainability.Possible alternatives should be considered to mitigate these risks.This interdisciplinary system enables individuals from different fields and hierarchies to effectively communicate, identify, analyze, evaluate, treat, and monitor diverse risk factors to achieve sustainable water resources.

Conceptual Framework
Figure 1 illustrates the workflow of this study.The first, second, and third columns represent the main steps, purposes, and methods used in our study.We first conducted a trend analysis to understand the general concern in society globally regarding sustainable water resource management.We then conducted a bibliometric analysis based on the available scientific literature by searching the Web of Science (WoS) database for keywords related to the risk of sustainable water resource management.Finally, we reviewed the importance of keywords.Those critical keywords were defined as risk factors and were classified into one of three categories: technology, organization, and environment.The scores of each risk were predicted to quantify its importance for sustainable water resource management in each and all three categories.

Trend Analysis
Google Trend, one of the most widely used search engines, was used to collect information about the public concern for sustainable water resource management.The search included keywords related to sustainable water resources, such as water conservation, water crisis, water scarcity, water risk, water stress, water resources, water sustainability, and water risk management.The search was conducted in three categories: web, news, and images, which represent all available information, official announcements by authorized media, and visualized information, respectively.The period of interest was from 2011 to 2022.The data were used to understand the information in three aspects: the number of times each keyword was searched, and the locations/regions where each keyword was of concern.

Bibliometric Analysis
Bibliometric analysis is a scientific review methodology that identifies core factors such as authors, keywords, and their relationships by tracking all publications associated with a specific topic or field.In this study, we used the WoS database to investigate the research trend in water resource management.We identified 11,883 research articles published after 2011 that contained the keywords listed in the previous section.We then removed repeated articles and those not written in English, leaving 7,569 articles.The titles and abstracts of these articles were reviewed to determine their relevance to sustainable water resource management.This resulted in 4,511 articles that were included in the next step of our research.The software "VOSViewer" was used to conduct a scientometric analysis of the research articles collected.This analysis focused on the articles' published year, domains, publishers, and keywords.The results of this analysis were used to create a scientometric map of the research landscape in water resource management.

Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) Framework
A conceptual framework developed from bibliometric analysis has been increasingly used in many research fields to help resource management and decision-making.The results of the bibliometric analysis were checked to ensure that no articles were counted twice.The title, abstract, and content of each article were read to determine the keywords associated with it.The keywords extracted from the articles were then classified into three categories: technology, organization, and environment.The categorial and overall scores of each  1) and (2), respectively.These scores were then used to quantitatively compare and discuss the importance of each keyword to each category or its overall contribution to sustainable water resource management.
where N A C and N T C denote the number of articles associated with keyword A and the number of the total article in one of the three categories (e.g., technology, organization, or environment), respectively.N A O and N T O denote the number of articles associated with keyword A and the number of the total articles in all three categories, respectively.

Trend Analysis
Figure 2A shows the number of search interests associated with the keywords mentioned above during the period of concern (Section 2.1) in the trend analysis.The results were categorized into three groups: web, image, and news.The results showed that water conservation was consistently discussed on the web and in images.Water conservation was reported to be critical in the context of long-term demand management that promotes water usage efficiency in both normal and extreme conditions (Loucks 2000).In certain periods, such as 2016, the word "water crisis" was increasingly discussed on the web and in news articles.The concern about the water crisis was partly due to urban water management in some well-developed countries, which was influenced by factors such as population growth, climate change, and the emergence of contaminants (Bolson et al. 2018).It is worth noting that the number of searches in all three groups gradually increased in recent years.
Figure 2B illustrates the spatial distribution of the keywords studied worldwide in the same period.The top four keywords related to the framework, as well as water risk management, were chosen for analysis due to system limitations.America, Oceania, and some countries in Asia, Europe, and Africa were the regions where these keywords were more frequently studied.The spatial distributions were similar between the information on the web, in images, and news.Water conservation, water crisis, and water resources were the keywords of greater concern in these regions.

Bibliometric Analysis
The trend analysis showed that the number of articles associated with the keywords of concern increased from 224 in 2011 to 831 in 2022 (Fig. 3).More than 95% were published in journals, of which 4,042 and 297 were original research articles and review articles, respectively.Figure 4A shows the top 10 domains of the publications collected in the trend analysis.Environmental Sciences & Ecology, Water Resources, and Engineering were the   top three domains, with more than 250 articles each.These findings suggest that research on risk factors of sustainable water resource management has grown rapidly in the past decade, with a focus on scientific and engineering issues.The studies were published in 726 journals, with 165 journals publishing more than 5 studies.This indicates that a growing number of journals, including those in other fields, are interested in the issues related to sustainable water resource management.Figure 4B lists the major journals that published relevant studies from 2011 to 2022.The included articles were uploaded onto VOSviewer for bibliometric analysis and to generate the Scientometric maps. Figure 5A depicts the frequency of the keywords in these articles, and Fig. 5B illustrates the connection between different keywords.Climate change (5.0% appearance rate) was the most cited keyword, followed by uncertainty (2.4% appearance rate).This suggests that the academics are concerned about the impact of climate change on the sustainability of water resources.Other keywords included water management, water quality, drought, flood, groundwater, sustainability, adaptation, and water scarcity.The figures also revealed stronger connections between different keywords, including climate change-precipitation, uncertainty-sensitive analysis, and risk assessment-groundwater.

Risk Factor Categorization
From the keywords in the bibliometric analysis, we set a minimum threshold of occurrences to define the risk factors that might affect sustainable water resources.The threshold was met by 62 risk factors.These risk factors were categorized into three categories: technology, organization, and environment, considering the strength of their connection to each category.Since new technologies are expected to benefit the development of sustainable water resource management, 16 risk factors were included in the category of technology.Table 1 lists the score and rank of these risk factors in the category of technology, as well as their overall scores and ranks when all risk factors in the three categories were considered simultaneously.The other keywords that did not meet the threshold but were associated with the category of technology were listed as items in the table.
In Table 1, statistical analysis had the highest score in the technology category and all three categories.It was reported in 815 articles.Statistical analysis is a common tool used in water resource management.Previous studies have used a variety of statistical methods, such as Bayesian theory (Xu et al. 2019) and copula-based fuzzy interval-random programming (Yu et al. 2020), to assess the influence of different factors on water resource sustainability.However, it is important to note that the results of these studies may vary depending on the methods used, as different methods may identify different key factors.Sustainable development was frequently reported in 455 articles, as expected, and had the   conditions.The risk factor with the highest score in the organization category was water management, with a score of 21.8%.It was reported in 286 articles.When all risk factors in the three categories were considered, water management had the ninth highest score, with a score of 3.76%.The other two most cited factors in the organization category were governance and water market, with categorial scores of 21.8% and 9.1%, respectively.Governance was reported in 119 articles and had the 16th highest overall score (1.56%) among all risk factors.Water market was mentioned in 108 articles and had the 20th-highest overall score among all risk factors.The water market comprises 11 items, including stakeholders (Setty et al. 2018) and trade-offs (Misra et al. 2021), which have been documented in previous studies.
Table 3 shows the scores and ranks of the 23 risk factors associated with the environment category.Climate change was the most critical risk factor in the environment category, with a categorial score of 17.9% and 620 articles mentioning it.It was also the risk factor with the second-highest score of all risk factors (an overall score of 8.15%).Climate change has been shown to have significant impacts on the areas important for drinking water supply (Selmeczi 2015).Uncertainty was the risk factor with the second-highest score in the environment category (a categorial score of 14.3%) and the third-highest score of all risk factors (an overall score of 6.52%).The other three important risk factors in the environment category were flood, water scarcity, and pollution.These words represent the major concerns when environmental factors are considered to achieve sustainability of water resource management.

Multilayer Risk Management Framework
Tables 1, 2 and 3 can be used to efficiently identify risk factors and those with similar or higher priority for sustainable water resources management.For example, if pesticide is identified as a risk factor in the environment category (Table 3), other potential risk factors listed under pollution, such as pharmaceuticals or arsenic, should also be assessed simultaneously.Pollution ranks 5 th in the environment category and 8 th in all three categories, indicating its significant impact on the management process.Pollution, flood, and water scarcity have similar categorial and overall scores, possibly due to their similar degrees of influence.
The information in Tables 1, 2 and 3 was used to propose a visualized risk management framework using Vensim PLE software (see graphical abstract and Fig. 6).The figure shows three layers in the management framework: the perception layer (inner layer), the risk layer (middle layer), and the application layer (outer layer).Assessment can be performed from the inner to outer layer or vice versa to identify, assess, and analyze certain or relevant risk factors for sustainable water resources management.For example, if water supply system is an option to enhance water allocation, since it is a risk belonging to the organization category (Table 2 and graphical abstract), other risk factors in this category, especially those with higher ranks, should also be considered.

Conclusion
This study began with a trend analysis of web search interest.Water conservation and water crisis were frequently mentioned on the web, as well as in images and news, suggesting the need to identify and address critical issues related to sustainable water resources.The bibliometric analyses also showed an increase in the number of publications on sustainable water resource management in the last decade, with 37% of the articles published in the last three years.Environmental science and technology were the most common field for these publications.

Fig. 1
Fig. 1 Workflow diagram of the study

Fig. 2
Fig. 2 Trend analysis for A the number of search interests and B the spatial distribution of the keyword from to 2022

Fig. 3
Fig. 3 Number of articles associated with the keywords of concern in the bibliometric analysis from 2011 to 2022

Fig. 4 AFig. 5
Fig. 4 A Top 10 domains and B journals of the publications in the bibliometric analysis

Fig. 6 A
Fig. 6 A Integrated technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework for risk management in sustainable water resources and risk factors in the categories of B Technology, C Organization, and D Environment.Please refer to Tables 1, 2 and 3 for more details.

Table 1
Risk factors in the category of technology affecting water sustainability

Table 3
Risk factors in the category of environment affecting water sustainability