Property law, customary tenure, and tourism-driven land conversion in Bali, Indonesia: An empirical socio-legal study

Devi Afrianty ()
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Devi Afrianty: Universitas Lampung

Indonesian Journal of Law, Governance, and Regulation, 2026, vol. 1, issue 1, 13-29

Abstract: This article examines property law in Bali as a plural socio-legal system in which national land statutes, provincial regulation, desa adat authority, subak irrigation institutions, and tourism-driven markets interact. The study uses a doctrinal and empirical socio-legal design. Open data from Statistics Indonesia for Bali, Bali legal-information systems, reports attributed to the Bali regional office of the Ministry of Agrarian Affairs and Spatial Planning/National Land Agency, and published government statistics are combined with peer-reviewed scholarship on Indonesian land law, legal pluralism, property rights, and Bali's subak landscape. The empirical results show a central governance tension. Bali has very high formal land-registration coverage, reported at 2,035,418 registered parcels or 95.4% of estimated parcels in 2023, yet registration has not prevented rapid changes in land use and market access. Reported rice-field area declined from about 70,995.82 ha in 2019 to 64,474 ha in 2024, with Denpasar and Gianyar experiencing particularly steep proportional losses. Only 39,973 ha of the 2024 rice-field area was classified as protected sustainable food agricultural land, leaving an estimated gap of more than 16,000 ha if the 87% national protection benchmark is applied. Tourism recovery after the COVID-19 shock intensified demand: direct foreign arrivals returned to 6.33 million in 2024, while accommodation and food services dominated Bali's fourth-quarter 2024 GRDP structure. The paper argues that Bali's property law problem is not merely weak titling; it is the misalignment between title security, spatial control, customary obligations, and market incentives. Policy reforms should integrate cadastral, spatial, and beneficial-ownership data, strengthen LP2B enforcement, and protect adat and subak land as social-ecological property rather than as ordinary alienable commodities.

Keywords: Bali; property law; adat land; land registration; subak; tourism; land conversion; Indonesia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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DOI: 10.55942/ijlgr.v1i1.1888

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