Customer Value as a Key Driver of Trust in Urban Agriculture Public Programs: Evidence from the Buruan SAE Program in Indonesia

Urban agriculture programs have increasingly been promoted as strategic public initiatives to address food security, environmental sustainability, and community resilience in urban areas. However, the sustainability of such participatory public programs depends not only on technical performance but also on the level of trust citizens place in public institutions. This study aims to examine the role of personal factors, physical evidence, and process in shaping customer value and customer trust within urban agriculture public programs in Indonesia. Drawing on service marketing and public governance perspectives, this study positions customer value as an intervening variable that mediates the relationship between service attributes and customer trust. A quantitative explanatory approach was employed using a cross-sectional survey of participants involved in government-supported urban agriculture programs. Data were analyzed using covariance-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) with LISREL. The results indicate that process quality and personal factors have significant positive effects on customer value, while physical evidence shows a relatively weaker influence. Furthermore, customer value demonstrates a very strong effect on customer trust, confirming its central role as a key psychological mechanism in trust formation. The findings suggest that public trust is primarily driven by citizens’ value experiences rather than by institutional attributes alone. This study contributes to the theoretical integration of customer value theory into public sector governance and provides practical insights for designing public programs that prioritize procedural quality and human interaction to strengthen long-term public trust. Keywords: Urban Agriculture; Customer Value; Public Trust; Public Service Quality.