Steven Watson | EdgeLab | Research and Scholarship | 19 September 2026

Why do administrative reforms sometimes reproduce the hierarchy they were meant to change? New performance measures, digital systems and merit procedures can look modern while leaving deference, privilege and control largely intact. Fadillah Putra and colleagues examine this problem in Indonesia through a provocative idea: “modernized cosmogony”.

The paper’s argument

In the open-access article, cosmogony means more than a story about the universe. The authors use it for a cultural logic in which authority occupies a morally elevated place and guardians of order are owed deference. They trace a proposed line from pre-colonial sacred kingship, through colonial administration and the paternalism of the New Order, to contemporary bureaucracy.

The key claim is adaptation rather than simple survival. Modern reforms are absorbed into an older hierarchical logic. Performance allowances become entitlements distributed through rank; merit procedures can become staged confirmations of established networks; digital government can reproduce opaque processes behind a new interface; removing formal management layers can produce new coordinating hierarchies.

The authors combine historical institutionalism, critical realism and strategic-relational analysis. Their corpus includes historical texts, public-administration scholarship, official policies, audit material and 2025 budget documents. A template analysis organises material through structural, discursive, technological and agential “selectivities”. Contemporary evidence includes provincial budget comparisons and reported indicators from Indonesia’s bureaucratic reform programmes.

This is an intellectually ambitious contribution. It asks why visible reform instruments do not necessarily alter the legitimacy relations beneath them. It also resists treating imported administrative models as culturally neutral. A procedure can travel internationally while acquiring a different practical meaning in each institutional setting.

Where the explanation is strongest

The paper is most persuasive when it shows how a reform tool can be reinterpreted. A metric designed to connect performance with public outcomes may instead confirm loyalty to a superior. A digital portal may increase front-end visibility while leaving the sequence of internal decisions untouched. This focus on translation helps explain why formal adoption and substantive change can diverge.

The budget discussion also usefully separates base salary from allowances, operational funds, housing and other facilities. Fragmentation matters because no single line displays the whole distribution of privilege. The provincial comparison is deliberately narrow, and the authors are right to say that identifiable fiscal differentiation is evidence before it is an explanation.

Where the causal claim needs more work

The difficulty is moving from evidence of hierarchy and opacity to cosmogony as their generative cause. The source selection is described, but not as a reproducible search with explicit inclusion rules. Higher-order codes come from the theoretical framework, while lower-order themes are inductive; the article gives limited detail about who coded what, how disagreements were handled or what evidence would count against the interpretation.

Several contemporary indicators are assembled from official documents, watchdog reports, journalism and other studies. This triangulation can be valuable, but some percentages in the reform table lack sufficiently clear denominators and derivations for a reader to audit them easily. The conclusion also shifts from “trillions of Indonesian Rupiah” in the article to “trillions of dollars”, which appears to be a material currency error.

Most importantly, unequal allowances do not by themselves demonstrate sacred legitimacy. Political bargaining, patronage, organisational incentives and weak enforcement offer plausible alternative explanations. These mechanisms may coexist with cultural deference, but the paper needs closer evidence showing when officials or citizens actually interpret privileges as appropriate tribute to guardians of order.

There is also a risk of explaining too much through a national cultural script. The authors explicitly call their framework dynamic and non-essentialist, yet a historical line spanning many centuries can still flatten contestation within Indonesia. Reformers, civil servants, journalists and citizens do not share one meaning of authority. Comparative cases where similar administrative instruments produce different outcomes would help identify when cosmogonic interpretation adds explanatory power.

An AE interpretation: how reform renews authority

The following is my interpretation, not the authors’ theoretical claim. Autopoietic ecology distinguishes producing an accepted output from renewing the capacities and authority that make future operations possible. Administrative reform can therefore be studied as a recursive process: a programme defines what counts as improvement, measures agencies against that definition and uses the resulting records to authorise the next round of the programme.

This helps sharpen the paper’s account of ritualised metrics. A performance score may fail to improve a service yet still succeed institutionally if it confirms that the authorised hierarchy has reviewed, ranked and rewarded its members. The recognised output renews the procedure’s authority. That is an AE hypothesis for investigation; the article does not itself prove it.

EdgeLab’s Research Programme asks how a recognised difficulty can change a subsequent decision. Applied here, evidence of reform should include more than compliance or portal coverage. Did a poor service outcome change an allowance, appointment, workflow or allocation? Could staff and citizens challenge the record on which the decision rested? Who had authority to require correction?

The AE Concept Guide also encourages attention to translation between domains. A public complaint, an audit finding and a performance score are not equivalent. Each transformation can preserve some distinctions and erase others. Following that chain would show whether accountability information constrains power or is converted into another display of successful administration.

How the argument could be tested

A strong next study would compare a small number of reforms across agencies or provinces. It could follow the same sequence: problem report, metric, review meeting, personnel or budget decision, and later service outcome. Interviews should include senior officials, frontline staff, auditors and service users, with attention to disagreement about respect, loyalty and public trust.

The cosmogony explanation would gain support if appeals to guardianship, harmony or status systematically redirected accountability, especially where material incentives alone did not predict the outcome. It would weaken if changes followed ordinary bargaining, resource constraints or enforcement capacity without the proposed legitimacy pattern.

Putra and colleagues make an important challenge to administrative reform: new instruments do not arrive in an empty institution. Their meaning is produced through existing relations. The practical task is to design accountability so that criticism can alter the next decision, rather than become another ritual through which authority recognises itself.

Reference

Putra, F., Kardoyo, H., Hidayat, D., Pradana, A. W., Asmara, A. Y., Prihanto, I. G., and Gunawan, H. (2026). “Modernized cosmogony: enduring hierarchies and the co-optation of public administration reform in Indonesia.” Frontiers in Political Science, 8, 1915649. Published 18 September 2026. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.1915649. The journal lists Fiorella Vinci as editor and Amni Zarkasyi Rahman and Ian Firstian Aldhi as reviewers.