Aviation governance and policymaking

Berker, Lars E.; Böcher, Michael

Abstract

The chapter begins with a brief bibliographic overview of research on aviation governance and policymaking, which shows an increasing academic attention to this specific subfield of aviation research and highlights economic, safety/security and climate change issues as main research topics. From a practical perspective, it is clear that these research foci also reflect typical issues that aviation governance deals with. We describe each of these issues individually and integrate them into a characterisation of the overall structure of aviation governance, which is based on several institutional rules that are relevant at the international level, but also on multiple levels of governance. Building on this, we describe the main features of aviation governance based on the Political Process Inherent Dynamics Approach (PIDA), which identifies the interplay of five main factors for political processes, namely problems, situational aspects, actors, institutions and measures. The chapter concludes with a critical reflection on the state of the art, highlighting in particular the need for a more genuine policy analysis perspective in research on aviation governance and policymaking in order to better understand its specific pathways and causalities.