Governing Through Values: Pangngadereng Service Ethics, Accountability, Transparency, and Citizen Trust in Makassar, Indonesia

Public Service Malls have proliferated across Indonesia, but there is no empirical explanation of the mechanisms that transform service experience into citizen trust, and research in these facilities rarely goes beyond satisfaction indices. We examine how service ethics rooted in the Bugis-Makassar pangngadereng values of Sipakatau, Sipakainge, and Sipakalebbi shapes citizen trust, and whether perceived accountability and transparency carry this influence. An explanatory quantitative design was applied at the Public Service Mall of Makassar City with 239 purposively selected users and a 27-item instrument, analysed through partial least squares structural equation modelling with a disjoint two-stage approach and 10,000 bias-corrected bootstrap resamples. Service ethics strongly predicted accountability and transparency, and both predicted citizen trust. The direct path did not reach conventional significance, and as much as 72.0% to 76.0% of the total effect propagates through these two governance mechanisms, indicating a predominantly indirect pattern. Sipakalebbi made the largest contribution to service ethics, while Sipakatau made the smallest, a finding that is in fact the opposite of the order of their mean ratings. This study offers novelty by placing local wisdom as an antecedent of governance mechanisms rather than a direct determinant of trust, and originality by providing a validated instrument for the three values, modelled as a reflective-formative second-order construct. The findings give local governments a practical tool for monitoring interaction quality.