Governance and effectiveness in aviation safety oversight: A structural model analysis

States and their respective national civil aviation authorities promote improvements to the global civil aviation system by enacting and enforcing safety regulations for aircraft design, operations, personnel training, infrastructure, and air traffic management, among others. Weak safety oversight systems can have significant social and economic implications, but local factors may affect their implementation capability. ICAO has driven the continuous development of states’ safety oversight functions, supporting them in evaluating the effectiveness of these functions by conducting audits under the USOAP program. While the benefits of these assessments have been widely recognized, the scholarly literature on the factors commonly associated with safety oversight effectiveness across states is limited. This study connects public governance theory with aviation state safety oversight, proposing a framework that links macro-level public-service capacity to sector-specific regulator performance. The theoretical framework is tested quantitatively by applying metrics collected by the Worldwide Governance Indicators, specifically Government Effectiveness (GE) and Regulatory Quality (RQ), as well as the ICAO safety oversight audits’ Effective Implementation (EI) metric. The research design combines confirmatory factor analysis and covariance-based structural equation modeling to validate the latent governance constructs and estimate their effects on EI. Results supported the proposed framework, which links broader dimensions of governance and aviation safety oversight, particularly between GE and EI. Theoretically, the results support the factorial validity of GE and RQ as well as the proposed governance–oversight framework. Recommendations are presented for aviation safety oversight organizations to consider governance measures in safety oversight assessment mechanisms and to promote additional research on the factors associated with oversight effectiveness. • The study explores the association between governance and aviation safety oversight. • Worldwide Governance Indicators and ICAO safety audit results support the analysis. • Results support the validity and reliability of the WGI structure. • Government effectiveness is associated with safety oversight among states. • Governance measures can support aviation safety oversight assessment planning.