From Bosai to Global Resilience: A Systematic Review of Social Capital in Disaster Risk Management Research

Social capital is among the most frequently invoked explanations of why some communities withstand disasters better than others, yet the research invoking it is scattered across disaster studies, organizational health, business, and environmental fields that rarely read one another. Japanese bosai culture, in which disaster preparedness is embedded in everyday neighborhood networks, represents the most fully institutionalized case of this resource at work and serves here as the benchmark for reading the wider field. No review has yet mapped this fragmented literature as a whole or asked how far it answers the questions the bosai case raises. This study reviews 217 peer‐reviewed articles (1999–2025) retrieved from Scopus and Web of Science, combining bibliometric analysis with a full‐text thematic classification. Four clusters emerge: disaster and community resilience (37.8%), business and supply chain risk (33.2%), climate and environmental adaptation (17.5%), and health‐related organizational risk (11.5%). Across clusters, bonding ties dominate immediate response while bridging and linking ties govern recovery, and social capital turns insufficient or exclusionary where inequality restricts access to networks. Two questions remain only partially answered: how disasters reshape networks over time, and how social capital interacts with ecosystem resilience, both constrained by the field's reliance on cross‐sectional single‐case designs. The review treats social capital as a phase‐dependent and context‐dependent resource rather than an unconditional good, and derives from this position a research agenda spanning five named gaps.