How do everyday moral economies shape the negotiation of belonging and precarity for people living and working in Bali’s tourism-leisure spaces?

Tourism in Bali has been widely studied through questions of development, culture, mobility and identity. Yet, comparatively less attention has been given to the everyday moral frictions that emerge in heavily shared tourism-leisure spaces where local expectations, global lifestyles, investment and changing patterns of residence increasingly overlap.

These tensions are not only economic. They concern questions of legitimacy, belonging and social order: who is seen as belonging, whose behaviour is considered acceptable, what forms of change are considered acceptable, and how competing ideas of culture, modernity and place are negotiated in everyday life.

By approaching these encounters through the lens of moral economy, this project shifts attention from tourism as an industry to tourism as a social world. It asks how informal values and judgments shape everyday forms of inclusion, exclusion and governance, and what these negotiations reveal about cultural change in contemporary Bali.

Moral Economy
How people judge what is fair, acceptable, legitimate or excessive in everyday social life.

Belonging
A sense of recognition and social legitimacy negotiated through everyday encounters, rather than simply legal residence.

Precarity
Forms of uncertainty shaped not only by economic position, but also by inclusion, exclusion and social legitimacy.

Informal Governance
The everyday norms, expectations and social practices through which order is negotiated beyond formal regulation.

Ambivalence
The experience of navigating competing norms, expectations and social worlds without a simple or stable resolution.

The project is designed as a qualitative, multi-sited ethnographic study across tourism-leisure areas with different levels and forms of tourism intensity, including Canggu, Seminyak, Ubud and Pererenan.

The proposed fieldwork combines participant observation, fieldnotes and approximately 25 - 30 semi-structured, in-depth interviews.

Participants will be recruited through established contacts, purposive sampling and snowball sampling.

Planned participant groups:

• Tourism and leisure workers

• Balinese residents engaged in the tourism economy

• Domestic and international visitors

• Intermediary actors, including organisers, community figures and relevant policy or NGO actors

Understand how tourism-leisure economies reshape everyday social relations, belonging and community life.

Examine how moral judgments, cultural expectations and informal forms of governance are negotiated within shared tourism-leisure spaces.

Compare how these dynamics are experienced across residents, workers, visitors and intermediary actors.

Ongoing · Preliminary Research

The project is currently in development. Formal interview-based fieldwork has not yet been completed.

Preliminary visits and informal conversations have helped shape the research questions and field design; these encounters are not treated or presented as formal research findings.

Formal participant-based research will follow principles of voluntary participation, informed consent, confidentiality and appropriate anonymisation or pseudonymisation. Sensitive personal information will be collected only where necessary and relevant to the research question.

This research has received an unconditional PhD admission offer from the University of Sydney for further doctoral development.

The doctoral project has not yet commenced and remains subject to securing appropriate funding.

The project draws on scholarship in moral economy, tourism studies, mobility, identity and everyday governance.

• E. P. Thompson : moral economy

• Didier Fassin : moral economies, values and affects

• Michel Picard : Balinese identity, culture and tourism

• Anette Fagertun : labour, class and social mobility in Bali’s tourism economy

• Paul Green : later-life / lifestyle migration, mobility and place-making in Ubud

• Claudia Dolezal & Marina Novelli : power and community-based tourism

• Leo Howe : religion, hierarchy and social change in Bali