---
id: people/stephen-lansing
about:
  label: J. Stephen Lansing
  depiction: people/stephen-lansing.jpg
  depiction_credit: 'Steve Lansing, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.'
  description: >-
    Anthropologist and complexity scientist whose model of Bali's water temple
    networks, built with James Kremer, showed how farmers' local choices can
    coordinate a watershed.
  aliases:
    - Steve Lansing
  tags:
    - Bali
    - water temples
    - complex adaptive systems
    - anthropology
person:
  affiliation: Santa Fe Institute
  role: anthropologist and complexity scientist
  homepage: 'https://www.santafe.edu/people/profile/j-stephen-lansing'
relations:
  - predicate: member_of
    target: organizations/santa-fe-institute
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: J. Stephen Lansing (Santa Fe Institute)
      url: 'https://www.santafe.edu/people/profile/j-stephen-lansing'
    - title: J. Stephen Lansing (Wikipedia)
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Stephen_Lansing'
    - title: 'J. Stephen Lansing (School of Anthropology, University of Arizona)'
      url: 'https://anthropology.arizona.edu/person/j-stephen-lansing'
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
J. Stephen Lansing, born in 1950, is an American anthropologist and complexity scientist.[^2] He is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna and emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona; from 2015 to 2019 he was founding director of the Complexity Institute at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.[^1] He took his doctorate in anthropology at the University of Michigan in 1977, taught at the University of Southern California until 1996, and joined the University of Arizona in 1998.[^2]

Most of his work is on Bali. With the ecologist [James Kremer](/people/james-kremer/) he modelled the water temple networks that set planting and irrigation schedules for the island's rice terraces, and showed that the networks can organise themselves.[^2] His research on the water temples was the basis for Bali's listing as a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape in 2012.[^1] He wrote about it in *Priests and Programmers* (1991) and *Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali* (2006). His most recent book, with Murray Cox, is *Islands of Order: A Guide to Complexity Modeling for the Social Sciences* (Princeton, 2019).[^1,2,3] He is working with Balinese colleagues to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from rice paddies, and with the Leakey Foundation and the Nature Conservancy to help hunter-gatherers in Borneo.[^1]

He is co-author of the 1993 paper [Emergent Properties of Balinese Water Temple Networks](/articles/lansing-kremer-balinese-water-temple-networks/). The [Bali scenario](/scenarios/bali-subak-water-temples/) starts from that model, and the [questions people ask](/about/faq/) page uses it as its example of a model that showed officials what farmers already knew.