Climate Change Integration in Public Sector Organisations: A Bibliometric Analysis and Systematic Review of Institutional Pressures, Governance Mechanisms, and Leadership Commitment

Public sector organisations stand at the institutional frontline of global climate governance, yet their capacity to translate formal climate commitments into operational practice remains poorly understood. This study addresses three interconnected gaps: the absence of a systematic mapping of the intellectual structure of climate change integration (CCI) research, theoretical fragmentation limiting an integrated organisational explanation, and the limited representation of empirical scholarship on CCI in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) governance contexts within the reviewed corpus. Through a bibliometric analysis of 434 peer-reviewed articles (2000–2025) and a systematic review of 44 studies, this paper maps the field's intellectual structure, synthesises its theoretical foundations, and proposes an integrated conceptual framework. Bibliometric findings reveal exponential publication growth concentrated in the post-2020 period, persistent geographic dominance by developed anglophone economies, and a disciplinary emphasis on environmental management rather than public administration scholarship. The systematic review advances three substantive findings: the policy–practice gap is structurally reproduced by multilevel governance arrangements rather than arising solely from insufficient regulatory ambition; the reviewed evidence supports the importance of sustainability governance effectiveness and top management environmental commitment as organisational predictors and provides a theoretical basis for conceptualising them as distinct parallel pathways through which institutional pressures may influence substantive integration outcomes; and GCC governance contexts exhibit a distinctive institutional configuration in which governance deficiencies and limited leadership commitment appear particularly consequential yet remain underexamined. These findings converge in an integrated conceptual framework that positions sustainability governance effectiveness and top management environmental commitment as parallel mediators between regulatory and stakeholder pressure and climate change integration outcomes and integrates Institutional Theory, the Resource-Based View, and Upper Echelons Theory within a single explanatory model, thereby offering a coherent theoretical account of public sector CCI research. The framework generates eight empirically testable propositions for a companion quantitative study and provides actionable guidance for closing the policy-practice gap in resource-dependent governance environments.