Keeping the Flame of Sustainability: A Critical Interpretation of the Methodology of Government Science

Menjaga Pijar Keberlanjutan: Tafsir Kritis atas Metodologi Ilmu Pemerintahan  (Keeping the Flame of Sustainability: A Critical Interpretation of the Methodology of Government Science) is a book-length invitation to rethink how knowledge about government is produced, validated, and used. Rather than treating methodology as a neutral toolbox, the book frames methodology as an ethical and political arena where questions of power, voice, and responsibility are always at stake. It challenges technocratic habits that reduce complex social realities to procedures, indicators, and standardized evaluations, and it argues that such habits can make scholarship “efficient” yet socially blind. In this sense, sustainability is approached not only as an environmental concern, but also as a commitment to intellectual integrity, social justice, and long-term public value.

Across its chapters, the book moves from diagnosis to reconstruction. It maps a methodological crisis in the study of government: the tendency to confuse precision with truth, measurement with understanding, and administrative order with public value. It explores how positivist assumptions and bureaucratic rationality can narrow the horizon of inquiry, steering researchers toward what is easily counted rather than what is socially decisive. A sustained critique of “neutrality” follows, emphasizing that data, categories, and policy designs always carry assumptions, interests, and exclusions. Readers are invited to ask uncomfortable questions: Who defines the problem? Whose experiences become “evidence”? What kinds of realities are erased when only certain variables are considered legitimate?

The constructive core advances a methodology grounded in solidarity and emancipatory purpose. It advocates approaches that recognize citizens and communities as epistemic partners who can co-produce knowledge, not merely as objects to be surveyed. Participatory inquiry, deliberation, community mapping, and citizen-led observation are presented as practical pathways to restore legitimacy to local knowledge and to reduce the distance between analysis and public struggle. Methodological rigor is reframed as accountability: accountability to context, to lived experience, to ethical consequences, and to the people who bear the costs of policy failure. The book also highlights the importance of ecological and social interdependence, encouraging inquiry that takes seriously place, history, and everyday practices.

The book addresses contemporary disruptions as well. It discusses digital governance, information asymmetries, and the risk of authoritarian control through technology, insisting that methodology must be adaptive enough to uncover power embedded in platforms, algorithms, and dominant narratives. It also treats global ideas and local contexts as a methodological challenge rather than a simple transfer of “best practices.” Instead of importing models uncritically, researchers are urged to build two-way interpretive bridges that respect difference while remaining analytically disciplined. The goal is not to reject comparison, but to make comparison honest about its limits and sensitive to power.

Ultimately, Menjaga Pijar Keberlanjutan calls for reviving epistemological awareness: methodology should open inquiry, not close it, and cultivate critical reflection rather than merely verify technical results. Clear, reflective, and provocative in tone, the book speaks to students, researchers, policy analysts, and practitioners who want their work to be both intellectually credible and socially responsible. It offers a roadmap for turning methodological choices into deliberate commitments to justice, context, and human dignity, while keeping the flame of inquiry alive in Ilmu Pemerintahan.