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# The Author(s) 2012. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Lansing/de Vet’s article tries to substantiate the conclusion Lansing has presented in all his publications since “Priests and Programmers”, namely that the irrigation management was exclusively performed by water temples and their com-moner priests. These water temples accomplished a synchro-nization of irrigation agriculture that was a means to achieve the sharing of water (up-stream/down-stream) and pest control. Furthermore, he suggested that subak (irrigation associations) have been democratic organizations run exclusively by farm-ers; no lords or rulers were involved in the management of irrigation agriculture. Lansing’s theoretical approach consti-tutes a grid which has been applied to the colonial literature in a deductive way and to data collection during fieldwork. The submitted article documents this perspective too