Vertical Coordination and Sustainable Housing Delivery: The Mediating Role of Intergovernmental Policy Coherence
Abstract
Amid rising pressures on affordability and decarbonization targets, housing delivery performance will become more dependent on how well federal and state governments are able to work together. Motivated by persistent delivery frictions and policy misalignments in Malaysia's multilevel system, this study asks, whether and how does vertical coordination uplift sustainable housing delivery due to the mediating mechanism of policy coherence? This research took the form of a cross-sectional survey of public officials and delivery partners (N=200) and estimated a prediction-oriented PLS-SEM with the programme SmartPLS. Measurement diagnostics verify good reliability and convergent validity. Structurally, the dominant, positive impact on delivery performance is attributable to policy coherence (β= 0.913, p<.001). Joint planning and regulatory alignment are both associated with increased policy coherence and have a direct impact on increasing delivery outcomes: Coordination of fiscal policies and intergovernmental trust are not statistically significant in this specification positive loadings are consistent with early integration costs or suppression effects with data interoperability. This research conclude that coherent and enforceable joint plans and harmonized codes are the highest-leverage governance levers to sustainable, on-time, on-budget delivery. Policy recommendations include institutionalization of cross-tier planning forums with common milestones, expediting code harmonization, sequencing data exchange reform to have minimum transition frictions, and realignment of transfer rules toward execution linked metrics. The findings offer an actionable blueprint of cooperative federalism in sustainable housing.
Keywords: cooperative federalism; policy coherence; joint planning; regulatory alignment; PLS-SEM.
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