The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology

ISSN: 1444-2213 (Print) 1740-9314 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtap20

Paradise Contested: Culture, Politics and Changing

Land and Water Use in Bali
Rachel P. Lorenzen & Dik Roth
To cite this article: Rachel P. Lorenzen & Dik Roth (2015) Paradise Contested: Culture, Politics
and Changing Land and Water Use in Bali, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 16:2,
99-105, DOI: 10.1080/14442213.2015.1006667
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14442213.2015.1006667

Published online: 23 Feb 2015.

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Date: 25 August 2016, At: 02:44

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 2015

Vol. 16, No. 2, 99105, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14442213.2015.1006667

INTRODUCTION
Paradise Contested: Culture, Politics and
Changing Land and Water Use in Bali
Rachel P. Lorenzen

& Dik Roth

Introduction
The small Indonesian island of Bali is widely known as a global tourist destination.
According to glossy tourist brochures the island is nothing less than a paradise.
However, the flipside of this paradisiacal image is its social and environmental
problems and conflicts, related to growing environmental pressures. Bali is far from
unique: many regions all over the world experience similar processes of change,
whether tourism-driven or related to other processes. Urbanisation and industrialisation, for instance, may drive conversion of land and transfers of water away from
agricultural to other uses.
What is unique about Bali then? Bali is of special interest, first, because the island
is extremely troubled by the effects of mass tourism such as a building boom, inmigration and problems of wealth distribution. These developments have a huge
impact on its people and the environment. Second, the interplay between the recent
socio-political changes in Indonesia from centralised authoritarian state control to
more freedom and democracy, and a Balinese society characterised by legal and
institutional plurality (Warren 1993, 2005) has provided opportunity for new
interpretations of and perspectives on tourism and its influence on how spaces are
used and landscapes occupied. Thirdly, of special interest to anthropologists is how
the distinctive and well-documented agrarian-cosmological order on this island is
coping with or being transformed by ongoing commoditisation, changing land use
priorities, touristification and urbanisation.
This special issue looks into these matters through a focus on spaces and landscapes. These are increasingly the object of contestations between competing and
Rachel P. Lorenzen is a Visiting Fellow at Resources, Environment & Development (RE&D) Program, Crawford
School of Public Policy, Australian National University; and Research and Development Advisor Social Services,
at Greencap Indonesia. Correspondence to: Rachel P. Lorenzen, PT Greencap NAA Indonesia. Intitland Tower,
Jl Jend Sudirman Kav 32, Lt 18, Jakarta 10220, Indonesia. Email: rachel.lorenzen@greencap.com.au; Dik Roth is
Assistant Professor at Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands. Correspondence to: Dik Roth,
Wageningen University, Department of Social Sciences, PO Box 8130, 6700 EW Wageningen, The Netherlands.
Email: dik.roth@wur.nl
2015 The Australian National University

100 R. P. Lorenzen and D. Roth

shifting meanings given to them, differential and contradictory interests, values and
valuations and opposing or overlapping legal and jurisdictional claims, institutions
and authorities. The papers for this issue were initially presented at the conference Bali in Global Asia: Between Modernization and Heritage Formation,
Denpasar, 1618 July 2012, in panels about Bali in national and transnational
networks, agriculture and the environment, and the Balinese irrigation institution of
the subak. This editorial briefly introduces the notions of space and landscape, and
contestations related to these. It also discusses the imagery created of Bali, influenced
by tourism development and more general socio-political changes. We end with a
short synopsis of the five articles that explore these issues from various angles.
Contested LandscapesContested Spaces
Landscapes and space have been subjects of much scientific writing in sociology,
anthropology and human and political geography. The term landscape has been
variously described as a definite and specific part of the environment that a viewer can
objectively see, and as a cognitive-symbolic construction and ordering of space
produced in interactions between people and the environment (Greider & Garkovich
1994). The experience of the landscape can be personal, but can also be part of the
identity of a particular group of people who invest both symbolically and materially in it
through the process of using, valuing and governing it (Duncan & Duncan 2009).
To escape from a dichotomy between naturalistic and culturalistic approaches, Ingold
(1993, 152) has proposed a dwelling perspective of landscapes, which sees the landscape
as constituted as an enduring record ofand testimony tothe lives and works of past
generations who have dwelt within it, and in so doing, have left there something of
themselves. Appadurai (1996, 33) introduces the notion of scapes in a wider sense, as
deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political
situatedness of different sorts of actors. Landscapes are, as such, imagined worlds
(33). The multiple ways in which they are imagined and made sense of as lived spaces by
actors interconnected in a globalised world are full of contradictions and disjuncture.
Fisher and Feinman (2005) stress the importance of leaving behind disciplinary
fragmentation and finding a common language for approaching the human-environmental relations through which landscapes are produced, reproduced and transformed.
As a boundary concept, landscape can provide common ground (Cliggett & Pool 2008).
These constructivist understandings and approaches focus on spaces and spatiality
as socio-culturally and materially produced in time-space contexts (Merriman et al.
2012). Space can be defined as a relationship between people and the environment
they use (Low & Lawrence-Ziga 2003). People use space to perform and engage in
social interaction and thus produce and construct space socially, culturally and
materially (Lefebvre 1991; Low 1996). Escobar (2001, 140) argues the need for more
attention to place, to be understood as the experience of a particular location with
some measure of groundednesssense of boundariesand connection to everyday
life. Merriman et al. (2012, 4) acknowledge the importance of the use of more

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101

encultured and embodied concepts, such as place, environment, landscape, region

and locale. However, they also stress that the very multiplicity and heterogeneity of
space and spatialityabstract and concrete, produced and producing, imagined and
materialized, structured and lived, relational, relative and absolute (4)make the
concept powerful for use in a variety of disciplines. Like landscape, it might thus also
function as a boundary concept.
A landscape becomes a contested space where people are increasingly concerned
with, but have different opinions about, its meaning and function, rights and
obligations allocated to it and forms of authority and decision-making determining
its uses. Contestations arise, for instance, when specific functions (agriculture, tourism,
living or sacrosanct space) are given preference over others without being clearly
defined, negotiated and agreed upon (see Backhaus 2008). Often this entails redefinition
of legitimate access to and control of important resources like land, forest and water,
characterised by new forms of in- and exclusion and new distributions of burdens and
benefits. At times confrontational, subversive or resisting, such contestations can also
be seen as a reiteration and recreation of culture, of peoples ideological and social
frameworks that structure practice (Low & Lawrence-Ziga 2003).
Thus, landscapes are not simply physical spaces that can be unproblematically
managed and controlled through legal and policy instruments. Rather, the variety of
ways in which spaces are discursively, historically and socially constructed and given
meaning as places are constitutive of these landscapes and give them their politically
and otherwise contested character (see Gupta & Ferguson 1997). Attention to the
multiple ways in which spaces are given meaning in these processes of place-making
can draw out the synergies, contradictions, contestations and conflicts between actors
engaged in multiple modes of ordering related to specific place-based identities,
notions of community and understandings of locality (Escobar 2001; Gupta &
Ferguson 1997; Van der Duim 2007). These processes also play an important role in
shaping the landscape contestations discussed in this issue.
Governing such processes of contestation and the landscapes emerging from them
in socially and politically legitimate ways is a complex affair. Recipes proposed by
variousoften competing actors for re-ordering contested landscapes and for
controlling, managing or solving landscape contestations present themselves in the
shape of new discourses (for example, of local knowledge, culture and tradition), new
forms of legal regulation and policies, new forms of cooperation and solidarity and new
practices of resource use, agricultural production and organisation. However, such
attempts at re-ordering contested landscapes through discursive means, laws and policy
prescriptions, and organisational arrangements and practices tend, in their turn, to
create new ambiguities, disjunctures, contestations and conflicts (Lewis & Mosse 2006).
Following Appadurai, Van der Duim (2007, 968) has coined the concept of
tourismscapes as complex processes of ordering, involving people, organizations,
objects, technologies, and spaces. It is these processes that we are particularly
interested in for tourism-influenced Bali. What follows is a brief introduction of the
development of tourism in Bali and of more general socio-political changes that

102 R. P. Lorenzen and D. Roth

paved the way for particular views of Bali and the Balinese, created competing
meanings and values related to Balinese tourism, landscapes and spaces, and led to
attempts at re-ordering and redefining management and control of resources as part
of these contested landscapes and spaces.
Tourism Development, Socio-Political Change and Shaping the Image of Bali
Covering around 5600 square km, less than 0.3 per cent of Indonesia, Bali is one of its
smaller islands. With a population of over 3.6 million in 2012 (see http://bali.bps.go.id/)
and a population density of 654 per square km, it is only outranked by the
neighbouring Indonesian island of Java. Around 83.5 per cent of the population of
Bali are Hindu, a specifically Balinese form of Hinduism strongly influenced by local
(Balinese, non-Indian) elements (Schulte Nordholt 1994; Picard 2011).1 As a result of
income from tourism, Bali has a relatively low percentage (4.2 per cent) of its population classified as living below the poverty line (see http://bali.bps.go.id/). Tourism
to Bali and the profound shaping of specific images of Balinese culture originate
from the Dutch colonial period (Hitchcock & Darma Putra 2007; Picard 1996;
Vickers 1989). Colonial and postcolonial attempts to preserve Balinese culture
occurred simultaneously with efforts to increase Balis exposure to tourists. Culture
increasingly became a selling point for tourism development, and has remained so
until today (Hitchcock & Darma Putra 2007).
Externally produced images of the island and its inhabitants have always deeply
influenced Balinese society and the Balinese self-image (Vickers 1989; Warren 1993).
A preoccupation with Bali as an orderly and harmonious cultural rather than political societyin which events like the 1965 mass killings become deviations (Robinson
1995) of this socio-cultural orderis quite prominent.2 Balinese have also come to see
themselves primarily as bearers of a unique and shared culture. Though this cultural
image of Bali sits well with the tourist gaze (Urry & Larsen 2011), it lacks sensitivity
to culture as a site of difference and contestation, simultaneously ground and stake of a rich
field of cultural-political processes (Gupta & Ferguson 1997, 5). Such images also form the
basis for political agendas and forms of administrative, social and legal engineering.
The multiple images of Bali engendered in space and landscape are deeply
embedded in, and interact with, socio-political developments in Indonesia. In 1998
President Suhartos New Order regime collapsed, giving way to a series of democratic
reforms. The balance of power shifted away from the central and provincial levels to
the district and local levels (Schulte Nordholt & van Klinken 2007; Warren 2005).
This turbulent period also saw a movement towards local and regional identities and
identifications, expressed in discourses of culture, ethnicity, tradition and customary
law (adat), religion and local knowledge (Davidson & Henley 2007; Schulte Nordholt
2007). According to Picard (2011), in Bali these redefining processes have led to a
local re-appropriation of religion and adat after many decades of government
control over these domains. As the contributors to this issue show, this is also key to
understanding the renewed contestations over spaces and landscapes.

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Global developments and the new political dynamics in Indonesia (with Islam as an
important factor) have inspired a widespread preoccupation with Balinese identity. The
constant flow of Muslim migrants to the island looking for economic opportunities
since the 1990s (Picard 2011) and the two terrorist attacks in southern Bali by Muslim
extremists in 2002 and 2005 in particular have further stimulated the segregation of a
specific cultural and religious Balinese identity. For example, a major political expression of Balinese identity against perceived threat was the slogan Ajeg Bali (literally, let
Bali stand strong, Bali firm; Allen & Palermo 2005), which functioned as a plea for
protection and revival of traditional cultural and religious values against external
threats like globalisation, migration, commoditisation and loss of local control over
resources (Allen & Palermo 2005; Picard 2011; Schulte Nordholt 2007). It is in the
context of these developments that have created, made visible and politicised different
meanings and values attached to resources and space, that we discuss Balinese
orderings and re-orderings of space and (re-)valuations of landscapes.
The Articles
The specific character and direction of landscape contestations in Bali that are the
subject of this special issue can only be understood against the background of wider
socio-political changes as discussed above. The articles in this issue deal with different
but related aspects of the main axes along which such contestations are taking shape:
growing spatial and resource pressures exerted by expanding tourism, and their
consequences for the environment, rural livelihoods, irrigated agriculture and
Balinese culture and identity. All authors share an interest in these aspects of
Balinese socio-environmental transformations. Whatever their focus, methods and
empirical basis, these articles contribute to anthropological theory related to policy
and politics, law, local knowledge, resource management and tourism, as well as to
water resources studies and agricultural science.
In the first article, Agung Wardana discusses the societal and political debates and
contestations around the Provincial Regulation (PERDA) on spatial planning, often
presented as a solution to Balis environmental problems. The author discusses these
contestations in a society characterised by legal-institutional pluralism. Greater
political freedom has provided civil society organisations with an opportunity to
actively engage with the law-making process, which has proven crucial to their
capacity as a party to negotiations.
Sophie Strau analyses local conflicts about tourism development in northern Bali,
specifically, how local actors and environmental NGOs formed a partnership that made
use of and mixed a global environmental discourse and discourses of religion, culture
and tradition, and in doing so, connected the local, national and global. Though this
alliance was quite successful in the struggle against external investors, local competition
for tourism opportunities continues to be a major threat to community coherence.
Lene Pedersen and Wiwik Dharmiasih shift the focus to irrigated agriculture and the
domain of the famous irrigation institution of the subak. The authors try to answer the

104 R. P. Lorenzen and D. Roth

question whether the state-sponsored re-enchantment of the subak domain, mainly

through shrine- and temple-building, originates from a state interest in controlling
resources, people and agricultural practices through invention of tradition, or actually
contributes to improving the livelihood of Balinese farmers and fulfilling their needs.
In an article that takes issue with widespread uncritical use of such concepts as
culture, tradition or local knowledge, Dik Roth and Gede Sedana discuss how
Balinese irrigated agriculture, exemplified by the subak, is increasingly framed in
terms of Hindu-Balinese culture and identity. The authors argue that the emergence
in the scientific and policy domain of the ideology of Tri Hita Karana (Three Sources
of Well-Being) requires critical scientific analysis rather than being taken for granted
and becoming depoliticised as culture or local knowledge, as it becomes the basis
for policy interventions in the domain of irrigated agriculture.
In the final article, Rachel Lorenzen explores the future of Balinese irrigated
agriculture given the pressures on the subak system and the wider social transformations of Bali. The use of scenarios facilitates debate about what futures of the subak
may be conceivable and/or are desirable in the complex processes of socialenvironmental change occurring in Bali, and explorations of the possible consequences of specific courses of action.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Henk Schulte Nordholt, Roger Tol and Carol Warren for
their support to this publication project.
Notes
[1]
[2]

The population of Bali also includes small numbers of Christians and Muslims. See http://bali.
bps.go.id/.
After the 1965 coup that brought to power General Suharto, an estimated 80,000 Balinese died
as a result of political violence (Robinson 1995).

ORCID
Rachel Lorenzen

http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5853-9031

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