In late 2017, Mount Agung erupted. Villages surrounding the mountain were evacuated in panic and confusion. The last time the biggest mountain in Bali situated in Karangasem District erupted was in 1963, causing a thousand deaths. One important source of confusion was in fact triggered by inconsistent information provided by the state institutions, especially on the level of eruption and those responsible for management of the emergency response. The Badan Nasional Penanggulangan Bencana (BNPB/National Body for Disaster Management) declared the scale of eruption as a provincial-level disaster, and in the end of November, it announced the highest level of warning of āawasā (alert). The announcement was covered widely by national as well as international media, resulting in a negative reaction from the tourism industry and high-ranking officials, who accused the coverage of being economically motivated by Baliās competitors in terms of tourism, especially Thailand (Radar Bali , 12/12/2018). The representatives of the tourism industry protested BNPBās declaration as it might affect tourist visits and result in visitor cancellations. According to the Minister of Tourism, this might cause a US$ 1.2 billion potential economic loss because the end of the year is the high season of Baliās tourism (Topsfield 2017).
In December, the Indonesia Hotel and Restaurant Association (PHRI) of Bali sent a letter to President Jokowi demanding the national government to take a necessary action to restore the situation (Kompas, 13/12/2018). The letter also stated that the industry would undertake mass labour redundancies if tourist visits continued to decline. Eventually, the national government responded to these demands by downgrading the level 4 āawasā (danger) into the level 3 āsiagaā (alert) and downscaled it to a district-level disaster. In late December 2017, President Jokowi even visited Kuta Beach to send a message to the world that it was safe to travel to Bali. The direct promotion from the president seemed to manage a gradual increase in tourist visits to the island. Meanwhile information and matters related to managing the response to the eruption have been localised reaching only villages surrounding the mountain. When the initial level 4 warning was declared by the BNPB through mass media coverage as well as social media, people across Bali and beyond spontaneously mobilised donations and transportations for evacuees and offered the refugees places to stay and build refugee camps (Antara News, 24/09/2018). As the result of localisation and downgrading, refugees staying in refugee camps beyond Karangasem District became less exposed to public eyes, leaving them under-resourced.
This crisis experience demonstrates the influence of the tourism industry in Bali. The declaration of a natural disaster that is supposed to ensure human safety and security as the first priority was compromised for the industryās benefits. Cok Ace, the Chairman of Hotel and Restaurants Entrepreneurs Association and the future Vice Governor of Bali (2018ā2023), suggested the tourism industry to capitalise the disaster as a new tourist attraction (Bali Post, 03/10/2017). Interestingly, the spokesperson of the National Body for Disaster Management, Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, also proposed a similar response that watching Mount Agungās eruption should be developed as a potential disaster tourism, as it would be a unique, once in a lifetime experience (The Strait Times, 29/10/2017). Tourism, as MacCannell (1992, 1) puts it, āis not just an aggregate of merely commercial activities, it is also an ideological framing of history, nature, and traditions; a framing that has the power to reshape culture and nature to its own needsā. In other words, tourism is an economic structure that has the power to inform the ways in which a society should conceive of and perceive itself. In Bali, introduced by the Dutch Colonial in the early twentieth century, the tourism industry has been growing rapidly, in the process compromising environmental sustainability and commodifying local culture (Picard 1996; Vickers 2012). The marginalisation of local communities, social and cultural displacement, as well as violence, contributed to the expansion of tourism on the island under the authoritarian regime of Suharto and has continued since (Aditjondro 1995; Warren 1998).
Following the fall of Suhartoās authoritarian regime in the late 1990s, the state structure was reconfigured through a process of decentralisation. Here, decentralisation should be seen as a form of downward rescaling in which governance is transferred from the national to the regional government. This reconfiguration of space and governance was a response to internal pressures from disaffected regions and to external pressures from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund seeking to liberalise the Indonesian economy (Schulte Nordholt and van Klinken 2007; Hadiz 2010; von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann 2013). In this process, authorities were notably transferred from the national government to district rather than to provincial level government, in part, because decentralisation to the provincial level was considered to threaten national integrity (McCarthy and Warren 2009, 5), but also because decentralisation to the district level had long been regarded as a mechanism for promoting neoliberal development and deregulation agendas (Hadiz 2010). Hence, under this new regime, the district government has become a new locus of power to pursue development across the archipelago.
Under decentralised governance, Baliās eight districts and one municipality1 have acquired a strong sense of authority to govern their territories (Wardana 2015). Economically, Badung is the richest district in the province because of its administrative and geographical position, where mature tourism infrastructures, including Kuta and Nusa Dua as well as Ngurah Rai International Airport, are situated. In 2014, Badungās local revenues (PADāpendapatan asli daerah) reached US$ 195 millionāmuch larger than the other eight districtsā revenues combined (BPS Bali 2015, 422).2 More than 70% of Badungās revenue is derived from the tourism sector, primarily from hotel and restaurant taxes (Tribun Bali , 01/04/2015). The economic success of Badung from the tourism industry has had a ādemonstration effectā, encouraging the other districts in Bali to follow Badungās path of development.
All districts have been competing to attract tourism investments and to extract revenues from such investments within their territory. In doing so, they often disregard the impacts of development beyond their territorial borders, not to mention side effects within. Promoting tourist investment provides opportunities for regional elites to engage in rent-seeking practices and chase easy money from granting permits or acting as local brokers. Hence, tourism and its related industries, especially the real estate and property businesses, have spread across the island while the provincial government made little effort to control district competition and the alarming path of development although it has the authority to supervise these.3 In fact, despite its proclaimed concern for balancing development and protecting the islandās culture and environment, the provincial government has also pursued policies that exacerbate these problems.
These accumulative impacts in the development of the tourism industry in Bali have affected social and environmental conditions in contemporary Bali. Many scholars have observed Bali reaching its tipping point that has led towards a socio-ecological crisis (Reuter 2003; Lewis and Lewis 2009; Suryani et al. 2009; Bali Post, 11/01/2009; Fox 2012). Productive agricultural land is converted to support tourism infrastructure (resorts, hotels, villas, and golf courses) in the framework of a mass tourism-oriented model of development, at a rate of around 1000 hectares per year (Warren 2009), threatening the subak āthe traditional irrigation societyāwhich is regarded ...
