Australia

For nearly a century, Western Sydney has grown as a suburban frontier, now accommodating one in ten Australians. However, the region faces imminent threats from anthropogenic climate change, with heat, drought, fire, and flood poised to render parts uninhabitable within decades. Despite city-wide discussions on climate preparedness, the input of everyday residents, particularly migrant and low-income communities, is often overlooked. Our research highlights the valuable insights these residents offer on coping with environmental extremes both inside and outside their homes.

This chapter proposes to recast the “supply chain” as a commons via an extended description of the shared social, intellectual, and regulatory resources currently producing an experiment in a circular economy for organic waste in Sydney, Australia. Organic waste, once composted, finds its way into high value-added crops like heirloom garlic which are then sold back to consumers in Sydney.

In urban theory our knowledge of actually existing justice practices in the city are limited. In contrast, our collective knowledge of the ways an ethic of care is practised is better developed. In this paper I argue for the need to value care in conceptualisations of the just city by mobilising the unification of care-thinking and justice-thinking in a way that accepts that both care and justice may (or may not) be practised as situated responses to injustice and neglect, and as other ways of doing/thinking/being the city.

Drawing on literatures on food justice, and geographies of care and the concept of care-full justice, this aim of this paper is to develop the concept of care-full food justice as an analytical framework through which to view the work of community food provisioning initiatives in the meantime.

This commentary reflects on the shifts in my personal and political lifeworld across time and space by sharing a story of changing awareness about ‘life-in-common’ in the Australian landscape; a landscape that is marked by historical, ecological and resource struggle and injustice. My commentary takes up the rethinking of differential belonging and ‘life-in-common’ as part of the search for alternatives to capitalism and a way to overcome socioecological crises which pays attention to the deep connections of nature and culture.

This paper aims to document the nature of social enterprise models in Australia, their evolution and institutional drivers. Design/methodology/approach: The paper draws on secondary analysis of source materials and the existing literature on social enterprise in Australia. Analysis was verified through consultation with key actors in the social enterprise ecosystem. Findings: With its historical roots in an enterprising non-profit sector and the presence of cooperative and mutual businesses, the practice of social enterprise in Australia is relatively mature.