Overtourism Beyond Numbers: Infrastructural Miscalibration and Spatial Justice in Bali

Overtourism is commonly framed as a crisis of excessive tourist numbers. Drawing on multi-platform netnography (1,877 comments; 618 retained; 875 coded references), this study examines how the phenomenon is formulated by participants themselves. Across all four Indonesian-language artefacts, twenty comments explicitly reject the term overtourism, attributing congestion to the modal composition of arrival rather than to visitor volume, which the study specifies as infrastructural miscalibration. Comparison across arenas yields an uneven asymmetry: spatial gridlock and grief are exclusive to domestic discourse, whereas governance failure leads in both, read as a failure to build domestically and to restrain internationally. Participants supply the obstructing mechanism themselves: provincial revenue and household livelihoods, they observe, depend on the vehicle circulation that infrastructural remedy would reduce, a configuration conceptualised here as an Infrastructure–Restriction Paradox. The findings position overtourism governance as a problem of spatial justice and the local right to mobility.