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Human encounters with waste can trigger reflections on taken-for-granted assumptions about consumption. Taking this observation as its starting point, this paper explores whether and how the introduction of the kitchen caddy and food waste composting at the municipal scale generates new environmental subjectivities in Australian homes. Using visceral research methods, the paper shows that, other than participation in municipal composting, close encounters with food becoming compost do not trigger more experimental or sustainable relationships with food. Rather, they trigger new configurations of cleanliness, tidiness and storage as participants seek to stabilise their home against the disruptive sight, smell and touch of food becoming compost. In unsettling the boundaries between humans and nonhumans, and cleanliness and chaos, food becoming compost produces visceral disgust among residents who are primed through modern home cultures to maintain cleanliness, control and the prevention of nonhuman intrusions at home. The success of municipal composting thus hinges on households' commitment to 'sustainability work' in placing, storing, cleaning and sealing food to reconfigure the modern home for waste recovery. Reconceptualising municipal composting as a co-production of sensory engagement and household practices, we centre a visceral politics of household sustainability at the heart of municipal composting and resource management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is widespread consensus in human geography that neoliberalism is achieved through the intersection of multiple scales and states, there has been growing emphasis in recent years on the hybrid qualities of neoliberalist-styles of governance. Because hybrid approaches draw attention to the wide range of actors and contradictory agendas underpinning the always uneven expression of neoliberalist projects, they are particularly suited to the identification of residual state capacities in contexts where neoliberalist forms dominate economic and political life. Drawing on two cases of large-scale residential development in New South Wales, namely Warnervale Town Centre on the New South Wales Central Coast and the Australian Defence Industry site at St Marys in Sydney's west, the present paper adopts an hybrid approach in order to identify current state capacities. Through a comparison of both sites, it identifies the potential for socially and ecologically balanced development in the outer suburban context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]