<![CDATA[Small-scale coastal tourism destinations in Indonesia are frequently managed under overlapping arrangements involving state forestry agencies, village government, and community institutions, yet how comparable authority ambiguities are negotiated in everyday practice, particularly once a destination enters visitor decline, remains largely undocumented. This paper draws on a qualitative single-case study of Tamban Beach, a coastal destination in Malang Regency whose annual visitor numbers fell from 13,600 in 2016 to 1,792 in 2022, to examine how spatial authority is distributed, contested, and practically negotiated among its managing actors. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with ten tourism actors, complemented by field observation and photomapping, and analyzed inductively. Findings show that the boundary between the tourism area and the surrounding settlement is reproduced through everyday practice rather than fixed by formal spatial planning; that authority over the site is contested between the state forestry agency, the village government, and a community forest institution, none of which is recognized by the others as holding final say; that responsibility for infrastructure and emergency costs has fallen largely to individual managers acting without institutional backing; and that access to external factors such as investors and political donors runs disproportionately through kinship ties, concentrating such access within a small, relationally connected group. These conditions are not experienced uniformly: some actors describe self-funded provision with quiet pride, others with suspicion, and still others respond to perceived unfairness through culturally sanctioned non-confrontation rather than open grievance. The paper argues that a shared tourism space does not, on its own, constitute collective governance, and that the individual initiative sustaining Tamban Beach is not equivalent to institutional capacity. It concludes by considering the implications of unresolved spatial authority for institutional coordination and spatial planning in comparable small-scale, declining coastal destinations. ]]>
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