Bali Subak: Communal Leadership from the Bottom Up

Traveling north from Bali’s international entry point of Denpasar, traffic gives way to villages and villages gradually give way to emerald terraced paddies of rice. Continuing northward, the rice paddies become the dominant feature of the landscape, stretching across beautiful swathes of hillsides, and falling away from the crater lakes that feed them life-giving water.

Visitors who venture this far inland will want to stop their car or motorbike to photograph epic vistas for the folks back home. Those who take the time for a stroll through the rice paddies will notice narrow streams carve between the paddies like bloodlines, with miniature waterfalls connecting higher paddies to lower.

Subak is the term for the system of irrigation itself, including canals and tunnels that carry water from the volcanic crater lakes to the coast. It’s also the name for the voluntary associations of paddy rice farmers who share a common water source for irrigation.

Bali’s subak is a classic example of what experts call a complex adaptive system (CAS). Academic study of CAS has developed only recently across diverse fields; generally speaking, a CAS involves many autonomous components or agents learning, adjusting and adapting to changing conditions as they interact both with each other and their environment. Examples include neural networks, social networks, stock markets, ecosystems, the Internet and the subak system.

Humans and the landscape here have co-adapted over a thousand years without direction from a centralized authority. The system self-corrects for periodic disruptions as varied as pests, dry weather, volcanic eruptions, or colonial invaders.

All male farmers in a subak must attend the meetings, participate in decision making, and pay a tithing to the collective. They all receive holy water through their subak temple’s priest, who collects the holy water from the priests at the island’s highest water temple Pura Ulun Danu Batur at the top of Mount Batur. Farmers belonging to a subak contribute both time for meetings and part of their harvest to their water temple. Their responsibilities also include rituals and rites performed on the Balinese lunar calendar.

Balinese society still operates according to castes that usually dictate how one person should speak to another. During subak meetings, everyone speaks to each other on a common level, without reference to caste. This encourages democratic participation. Violation of this egalitarian convention can prompt fines.

Anthropologist Stephen Lansing, the world’s foremost non-Balinese expert on subak, and his colleague James Kremer designed a computer model to test whether the subak system could come about through spontaneous self-organization, rather than being directed by a central authority. Simply by virtue of sharing the same goals—optimizing yields, minimizing pests, ensuring adequate water supplies—the model showed how coordination like the subak system promotes high yields not only for a few, but for everyone. Nature tends to punish—with lower yields, pest infestations, or water shortages—those who defect from the cooperation, such that over time, the subak associations of farmers become a self-sustaining equilibrium.

Water temples across the island provide forums in which farmers of each subak gather to agree upon planting schedules in order to use their common water source equitably and to coordinate fallow periods that control pest outbreaks. Farmers in a subak are thus also congregants of a given water temple. These are democratic participatory institutions, but they are also religious institutions. All Balinese, revere the Goddess of the Lake Dewi Danu as well as the Rice Goddess Dewi Sri.

Beyond the infrastructure of canals and waterways for irrigation, the subak social structures for management of water flows and pest control were invisible to outsiders for generations, manifesting tacit knowledge of best practice in balancing the demands of the earth, the spirit and the community.

Balinese people are imbued from early childhood with their philosophy of Tri Hita Karana, which emphasizes right relations with God, the natural environment and fellow human beings. The subak system is an island-wide manifestation of this holistic philosophy that embraces that need for balance between reverence for the divine and the messy business of getting enough for everyone to eat.

“This is the theatre in which we can look for comprehensive solutions instead of piecemeal solutions,” said Lansing, who has studied Bali’s subak for over three decades. Lansing, among others, has criticized the Green Revolution’s narrow and myopic focus on increasing grain yields. The Green Revolution—in which international donors funded directives for large scale adoption of monoculture with intensive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides—swept much of the developing world, including Indonesia, in the 1960’s.

“My research with James Kremer showed that the Green Revolution failed because planners did not understand the role of water temples in managing the ecology of the rice terraces,” explained Lansing. “We showed that the temple networks are a real-world example of a complex adaptive system.”

The collective management of water resources has proven sustainable for a millennium. Bali subak’s recognition by UNESCO as World Heritage differs from Cambodia’s temples at Anchor, for instance, because the subak heritage is still alive, a testament to the functionality and sustainability of democratic, collective management, at least on this small, culturally homogenous island.

The communal leadership model of the subak has proven successful where the Green Revolution’s top-down leadership failed. Yields increased with the Green Revolution, but nutritional quality, environmental health and holistic sustainability were sacrificed.

Well-intentioned Green Revolution planners in the 1970s failed to see the practical as well as spiritual importance of the subak system with its water temples, priests, goddesses and rituals, according to Lansing. Planners brought in technology packets with high-yield rice varieties and chemical fertilizer that continues to degrade Bali’s traditional rice culture, soils and even coral reefs surrounding the island.

The subak irrigation system carries volcanic soil naturally rich in potassium, phosphorus and nitrogen down through watersheds. Ecologists discovered that most of the chemical fertilizer adopted during the Green Revolution proved excessive and washed off into the ocean, harming nearby coral reefs.

While the Green Revolution challenged the subak from the top-down, the dominant tourism economy in Bali today challenges subak from all sides, paddy by paddy, as restaurants, hotels and villas multiply and encroach. Property taxes are based upon potential economic value of land where it is developed, rather than the productive history or potential of farmland. Even farmers with consistently strong harvests face ever-increasing land taxes, rising due to development next door. This puts enormous pressure on farmers to sell or lease their land rather than continuing to grow food. The momentum of tourism development on this model leads to ever diminishing food production on the island to feed an ever increasing population of locals and visitors. Moreover, as land is converted away from agriculture and associated cultural traditions including rituals, offerings, temples and rice paddies toward concrete structures to serve a mass tourist market, Bali’s strongest draws for tourists will weaken inexorably.

Invaluable as endangered cultural heritage, Bali’s subak may also prove instructive in contexts beyond Bali’s shores. Supporters of the UNESCO bid hope that it will not only raise awareness about Bali’s traditional methods of sustainable agriculture but also provide a new model for UNESCO World Heritage sites that empowers local communities to keep more of their earnings.

“We are hoping that this will trigger an increased involvement on the part of communities both in terms of design and implementation and in terms of sharing revenues,” said Maria Osbeck, Research Fellow in water management and rural development at the Stockholm Environmental Institute. Farmers might more likely soldier on as farmers if they feel they have a greater stake in the tourism-related revenues agriculture can help attract.

“The subak system represents a kind of wisdom that is vital for intelligent climate adaptation and sustainable development,” observes Tom Hilde of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, who recently brought graduate students to Indonesia to study development challenges. “To lose it would be not only to lose a thing of great beauty, fascination and dynamism but also a powerful critique of the failures of existing development paradigms.”

Agro-tourism might provide a balance to help resolve these tensions. Educating tourists about the role of agriculture in the intricate beauty of Balinese culture and topography seems an important step. Who could fail to be amazed by the elegance of Bali’s living heritage when offered an opportunity to appreciate its entirety?

UNESCO World Heritage recognition might help tip the scales toward tourism that preserves a unique and vibrant way of life that has stood the test of time but now faces threats from outsiders who could unwittingly love the island to death. Though few Balinese kids today would admit to wanting to be farmers when they grow up, “Cultural Interpreter” sounds like a pretty cool job, and Bali could be training many more of them.

Photo by Glenn Chickering