Co‐Creation, Platformization, and Public Service Effectiveness in a Developing Governance Context

ABSTRACT This study examines how public employees perceive the associations among co‐creation, platformization, and public service effectiveness in Cambodia. Adopting a perception‐based perspective, it focuses on how government staff interpret digital transformation within their organizational context. Using survey data from 270 public employees analyzed with PLS‐SEM, the findings indicate that co‐creation is positively associated with employees' perceptions of service effectiveness, while platformization serves as an associative pathway linking collaborative processes to evaluative outcomes. These relationships are interpreted cautiously, given the cross‐sectional design. Situated within Cambodia's context of uneven digital capacity and centralized governance, the results reveal generally positive employee perceptions that contrast with structural constraints identified in the literature. Overall, the study demonstrates that perceptions align with theoretical expectations yet diverge in light of contextual challenges, highlighting the importance of perception‐based analysis for understanding digital governance in resource‐constrained settings.