Pressures on the Balinese world cultural landscape heritage: The case of Jatiluwih Subak Village

Abstract

Since is declared by UNESCO as the World Cultural Landscape Heritage in 2012, Jatiluwih and some rice terraces and their water temples increasingly got the attention of the world community. Jatiluwih Village area with its outstanding rice paddy terrace and the subak system becomes a magnet for tourists in Bali to visit it, especially foreign tourists. This paper is concerned with the pressures faced by the village of Jatiluwih as it develops as a cultural tourism attraction. It aims to examine activities especially which relate to tourism that may support or give negative impacts to the sustainability of the village. It also examines the management system of the area and questions whether that system is able to maintain its outstanding value and integrity. Descriptive and qualitative approaches are used based on field observation, FGD and deep interviews. This paper notes that the development of tourism activity has become the pressures for the rice terrace. Although physically the landscape of Jatiluwih still shows its character as a traditional village with outstanding rice terraces, some changes have happened, and threats toward its sustainability is clearly seen caused by the weakness in the management system. This becomes the challenges of Jatiluwih to maintain its predicate as part of the world cultural landscape heritage.