Bali sits at a delicate intersection: it is both a cautionary tale of over-tourism and a powerful model of cultural resilience. On one hand, spiritual spaces are being eroded by commercialization. On the other hand, those same cultural codes are being revived, reinterpreted, and passed on in new ways through eco-education, ritual adaptations, and community activism.

Although it is currently facing the pressure of being preserved amid rapid tourism development and external modernization, it remains a hotspot for sustainability discourse, both as a symbol and as a lived reality. So, how does culture influence the conversation and movement around sustainability?

Culture plays a crucial role in shaping how sustainability is understood, practiced, and maintained within a community. It influences values, behaviors, and social norms that can either support or hinder sustainable development. Indigenous and local communities often carry centuries-old knowledge about land, water, and resource management. Cultural practices often encode generations of trial-and-error knowledge, especially in environments that are context-specific (like volcanic slopes, peatlands, or mangroves).

To understand why Bali, despite its pressures, remains central to sustainability discourse, we must look beyond environmental programs and policies. What makes Bali, and many parts of Indonesia, stand out is not only their biodiversity, but their culturally embedded ways of living with the land. Across the archipelago, culture has long been the invisible scaffolding of sustainability—shaping relationships with nature, resource governance, and the transmission of ecological wisdom. In other words, culture doesn't just support sustainability—it defines it.

Let’s explore the many ways this happens:

Culture Shapes Narratives in Sustainability

Culture can shape narratives in sustainability not just how we act, but how we frame the problem and define the solutions. These narratives influence what a community values, how it interacts with nature, and what kinds of futures it strives for.

In many Western contexts, nature is often perceived as a resource: separate from human life, to be measured, optimized, or extracted efficiently. The dominant narrative is about minimizing damage: “less carbon,” “less waste,” “less impact.” But in many Indigenous or Eastern cosmologies, nature is not external—it is kin. It is alive. It is entangled with ancestry, memory, and responsibility. In this worldview, sustainability is not about less; it’s about balance. About keeping promises made to the land, to ancestors, and to future generations.

Culture Encodes Knowledge Through Everyday Life

Cultural practices carry practical ecological knowledge, but they do so implicitly, through rituals, customs, oral stories, and taboos. For instance:

• Sasi in Maluku isn’t just a local fishing ban. It encodes ecological cycles, community enforcement, and collective restraint.

• Pranata Mangsa, the Javanese planting calendar, integrates lunar phases and microclimate observations to guide agriculture in highly variable landscapes.

• Among the Dayak in Kalimantan, Tana Ulen (customary forests) are protected not by state law but by spiritual law, symbolized through totems, stories, and kinship ties.

In each case, what looks like “tradition” is often a highly localized environmental governance system, built on generations of lived experience. This matters because modern sustainability initiatives often overlook such systems, choosing instead to impose technical fixes that may fail to root in local contexts.

Culture Provides Legitimacy and Continuity

Another deep influence of culture on sustainability is its ability to create long-term social legitimacy.

In many Indigenous and rural communities, people don’t follow environmental rules because the government enforces them; they follow them because they are woven into collective identity.

• You don’t burn the sacred forest, not because it’s illegal, but because your grandmother said that’s where the spirits rest.

• You plant in a certain season, not because a forecast says so, but because your community has always done so.

• You don’t overfish a reef because your whole village agreed it would ruin the catch for your children.

These aren’t superstitions. They are cultural codes of long-term responsibility, built on values like respect, restraint, and reciprocity. And they are often more durable than top-down interventions.

When Sustainability Shapes Culture in Return

Culture doesn't just shape sustainability. The relationship is reciprocal, sustainability efforts can also influence culture by:

• Reviving traditional practices that had been forgotten or suppressed.

• Creating new rituals, such as community cleanups or climate ceremonies.

• Shifting norms, like how some Balinese temples now encourage reusable offerings instead of plastic-packaged ones.

Across Indonesia, we see examples of this feedback loop:

• In Papua, younger generations are blending sasi laut with marine science, revitalizing cultural pride while strengthening conservation.

• In West Sumatra, lubuk larangan practices (seasonal fishing bans) are gaining formal recognition in river management.

• In urban Java, eco-Islamic boarding schools teach sustainable farming as a form of spiritual devotion, merging faith with action.

This dynamic shows that sustainability is not just a technical fix, it’s also a cultural evolution. One that works best when rooted in shared meaning, not just metrics.

Culture as the Thread that Holds Sustainability Together

To truly understand the dynamic of sustainability as a lived reality, we must look beyond strategies and statistics. We must look at stories, rituals, values, and relationships. These are the tools that communities have used for generations to live within limits, care for land, and pass on wisdom.

If policy is the skeleton of sustainability, culture is the nervous system—it gives life, feeling, and direction.

As Bali continues to wrestle with its dual identity, tourism capital and spiritual heartland, it reminds us that sustainability is never one-size-fits-all. It must grow from the inside out. And across Indonesia, from the rice terraces to the coral reefs, culture remains not a relic of the past, but a resource for the future.