International maritime safety regulation applies formally uniform standards to vessels regardless of trade, yet safety outcomes diverge sharply between internationally certified and domestically operated vessels within the same national fleet, a pattern documented but not yet systematically synthesised. This review assembles theoretical, legal-governance, and empirical literature addressing safety culture and safety climate divergence in shipping, following a PRISMA-informed two-pass screening and extraction protocol applied to thirteen substantive sources spanning global regulatory analysis and Indonesia-specific empirical research. Thematic and cross-group synthesis indicates that safety climate theory and STCW/ISM governance architecture jointly explain why such divergence is structurally expected, that documentation-focused mechanisms such as the ISM Code have limited independent power to resolve it, and that Indonesia-specific evidence consistently, though indirectly, confirms the divergence empirically. The review identifies professional socialisation as the most theoretically implicated yet empirically uninvestigated mechanism sustaining this divergence, since no existing source directly examines how practitioners' understanding of acceptable safety practice differs across operating contexts within their own careers. The review offers regulators and training institutions an evidence base favouring socialisation-aware interventions over documentation-focused remedies alone, and specifies the comparative qualitative study needed to close the field's most consequential remaining gap.
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