You can easily do this by following the best practice of removing obtrusive javascript anyway.  

You can setup a delegate handler so event handling isn't tied to a specific element.  Just setup a handler on the `body` element which will never get added or removed.  Click events will eventually bubble up to body, then pass in a selector so you just pay attention to clicks that meet your criteria like this:

    $("body").on('click', ".sidebar a", function() {
      $(this).data(activeFolder, 1)
             .data(render);
    });


Within my jQuery plugin execution flow I render this sidebar list of links.

    //render method
    var render = function(self){

      var sidebar = '';
      var main = '';

      /* Sidebar */        
      sidebar += '<ul>'
      sidebar += '<li><a href="javascript:self.data(activeFolder,1);self.data(render);">Rootobject 1</a></li>';

    }

Only I don't want the link to print out `self`, but I want a reference to the object referenced by self instead. 

------------- UPDATE ------------

I'll try to explain my problem in a different way.

If I had been working with this plugin from the body of the page, I could easily store a reference to it upon init

    var myPlugin = $('.some-element').myPlugin();

and later do this:

    <a href="javascript:myPlugin.render();">Rootobject 1</a>


Now, I want my plugin to prepare that same link, so how can I write a refrence from within the plugin to substitute the myPlugin var in this example above?