This study explores teseng, a Bugis-Makassar profit-sharing arrangement in agricultural and livestock production, as a local economic institution that shapes the relationship between pappatteseng (land or livestock owners) and patteseng (cultivators or caretakers). The problem addressed is the persistence of verbal, trust-based profit sharing that is socially effective but vulnerable to unclear cost calculation, weak documentation, and limited institutional recognition, while modern capitalist and Islamic banking-oriented profit-sharing models do not fully reach traditional agrarian cooperation. This study seeks to explain how teseng functions, identify its constraints, compare it with Islamic and capitalist profit-sharing models, and reconstruct its accounting interpretation through the Eko-Akunta-Nesia perspective. Using a qualitative phenomenological-hermeneutic approach, data were collected through in-depth interviews, participatory observation, and documentation involving 11 informants consisting of teseng practitioners, traditional leaders, religious leaders, and academics in Bone Regency, South Sulawesi. The findings show that teseng distributes profit proportionally according to land, seed, fertilizer, labor, livestock, and risk contributions; maintains accountability through siri’, lempu, passe, collective memory, and social sanctions; and differs from capitalism because it does not place capital accumulation as the sole measure of success. It is compatible with Islamic principles of justice, consent, trustworthiness, prohibition of oppression, and proportional rights and obligations, although it remains outside formal Islamic financial institutions. The study concludes that teseng can be reinterpreted as an Eko-Akunta-Nesia model of value sharing and social accountability without altering its customary substance.
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