Legal Pluralism and the Challenges of Complete and Systematic Land Registration (CSLR) of Customary Land in Bali

I Ketut Kasta Arya Wijaya (Universitas Warmadewa)
Made Suwitra (Universitas Warmadewa)
Made Jaya Senastri (Universitas Warmadewa)
Nur Ezan Rahmat (Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM))

Trunojoyo Law Review
Vol 8, No 2 (2026): August

The implementation of the Complete and Systematic Land Registration (CSLR) Program has significantly improved land certification in Indonesia; however, applying it to customary land continues to create persistent juridical and institutional challenges because state land administration and customary land governance coexist. Previous studies have primarily examined CSLR through the lenses of administrative effectiveness, legal certainty, or the normative recognition of customary rights, while paying limited attention to how legal pluralism shapes institutional conflicts and the mechanisms needed to reconcile competing legal systems. This study addresses this gap by examining the implementation of CSLR on customary land in Gianyar Regency, Bali, through a legal pluralism framework. This study employs a qualitative socio-legal approach, combining normative legal analysis with empirical data from semi-structured interviews and document analysis. The findings show that the main obstacles to customary land registration are structural rather than merely administrative, including institutional asymmetry between state and customary authorities, the unclear legal status of customary land, limited integration of customary institutions into the registration process, and tensions between communal land tenure and formal land administration. These findings show that legal certainty cannot be achieved solely through standardized registration procedures without accommodating the normative legitimacy of customary governance. This study contributes to the literature by operationalizing legal pluralism as an analytical framework for explaining institutional conflicts in customary land registration and by proposing a Customary Land Verification Forum as an operational institutional mechanism that integrates customary verification into the CSLR adjudication process, thereby reconciling state and customary legal systems while strengthening legal certainty and protecting the collective rights of customary law communities.