World Heritage-Making in the Pluralistic Legal-Institutional Setting of Catur Angga Batukaru, Bali (original) (raw)

As the subak system, the backbone of Bali’s agricultural heritage, is threatened by many challenging factors which compromise its existence, new approaches to address such threats have been introduced. One of them is the designation of the UNESCO World Heritage List. The listing of the Subak Landscape of Catur Angga Batukaru involved a re-territorialisation undertaken by the Indonesian state during the nomination process. It is expected to expand the tourism market and in turn to provide incentives for local farmers to preserve the landscape. This presentation will examine this re-territorialisation process using a legal pluralism approach. It argues that the reconfiguration and rescaling of the Subak Landscape of Catur Angga Batukaru did not carefully assess the pluralistic legal-institutional and power dynamics at every scale. As a result, alliances and contestations between social forces aimed primarily at accessing power and resources have used this complex legal-institutional setting to facilitate or constrain particular interests at the expense of others. The fundamental failure of the original nomination to undertake adequate consultation and ensure participation at the scale where local social interaction and political dynamics take place - the subak itself - is compounded by failure to ensure full participation and benefit sharing in the management of the World Heritage site since its designation. If not corrected, the disingenuous conflation of conservation and commodification objectives of power-holding interests will undoubtedly lead to the failure to build a sense of subak ownership toward the program and inability to prevent vested interests from undermining the interests of the whole.