Amid accelerating environmental and socioeconomic shifts, cultural landscapes and Indigenous lifestyles form a dynamic, reciprocal system, continuously reshaping each other. This article presents a conceptual framework exploring how transformations in cultural landscapes influence Indigenous practices, which in turn shape future landscape evolution. The framework operates across three interconnected levels: external forces, landscape changes, and community effects, emphasizing interaction pathways and feedback loops. Through systematic application to the Balinese Subak system, this study demonstrates the framework’s utility in decoding complex transformation processes. Key findings reveal that communities maintain cultural continuity through dynamic knowledge integration combining traditional wisdom with modern innovations. Rather than simple replacement, hybridization processes create social-ecological arrangements maintaining both cultural integrity and adaptive capacity, informing policy and conservation strategies for cultural landscape management.