Jo Lindsay

Banten Province, Indonesia, is a critical yet overlooked frontier of urbanisation. Despite being one of Southeast Asia’s fastest-urbanising regions, its secondary cities, towns and peri-urban hinterlands remain marginal in urban studies and sustainability science. This neglect is consequential. Future urban growth will increasingly concentrate in such settlements, yet debates on urbanisation in Indonesia and Southeast Asia remain focused on metropolitan regions such as Jakarta, one of the world’s largest urban areas. This paper addresses this gap by combining a cross-sector participatory horizon scan with a responsive development pathway for under-resourced territories. Thirty-four participants from academia, government and professional associations co-produced insights into Banten’s urban trajectories, triangulated with literature and secondary data. To our knowledge, this study draws on the first expert workshop on Banten’s urbanisation of this scale, cross-sectoral reach and disciplinary breadth, spanning six domains: economic development, physical infrastructure, social development, cultural heritage, environment and biodiversity, and disaster vulnerability. The deliberations also identified nine cross-cutting issues—including governance deficits, environmental injustice and climate risk—that underpin territorial inequality. From these findings, the paper synthesises a responsive development pathway that supports coordinated planning and governance across Banten’s urbanising settlements and offers a transferable model for negotiating extended urbanisation in rapidly urbanising Global South regions.

Repair and maintenance of household goods facilitate longer product use lives. These activities can be considered forms of consumption work that may be critical for the realisation of the circular economy but lack visibility and the attribution of value (Hobson et al, 2021). We draw on findings of a survey of 2,717 households across Australia in which respondents were asked about their practices of maintaining and repairing three types of products: (1) clothing and accessories; (2) furniture and homewares; and (3) appliances and white goods. The analysis offers insights into socio-demographic patterning of households most and least likely to repair and maintain the different product types. Life stage, gender and income are particularly significant for household repair and maintenance practices. These patterns may be best explained in terms of economic capacity, necessity, and availability of time, skills and space. The dynamic between environmental, social and economic motivations for repair and maintenance may be fluid and there is evidence of a value–action gap. We argue that a strong foundation exists for household-scale consumer-driven practices that could be supported to complement parallel transitions in production systems towards product design for repairability and longevity, in line with circular economy principles. We reflect on the implications for changing social norms and practices as part of a societal scale transition towards more sustainable forms of material use, and position repair and maintenance within the social dimensions of a circular economy transition, particularly in relation to debates around green growth and degrowth.

This article explores the nature of domestic labour involved in sustainability transitions at the household level, with waste reduction as an exemplar. We draw on national survey data (N = 2717) from Australia, and qualitative data from a participatory action project working with 34 householders on experiments in low waste living. We found low waste living was challenging work mentally, physically and interpersonally and required information, skills and the resources of time and money. Waste reduction in households also required relational labour inside and outside the household. On the basis of existing literature and our findings we theorise that sustainability labour is comprised of five overlapping elements: physical, cognitive, relational, economic and political tasks. We argue that reducing waste is an example of sustainability labour that is led largely by women, as they work to change household practices and the systems in which these are embedded, towards a more sustainable future.

This article explores the COVID-19 pandemic as an external “shock” that changed household-consumption practices in Melbourne, Australia. We assess national consumption data and retail data for the state of Victoria to show how dramatically consumption patterns shifted during 2020. We then discuss three specific examples of changed consumption practices during the pandemic drawn from an analysis of media reports: bread baking, food growing, and bicycle riding. These activities illustrate how the pandemic and resultant lockdowns enabled innovation in domestic consumption, enhanced food security and resilience, and created space for the experience of a slower way of life. We argue that the pandemic provided impetus to experiment and innovate in ways that are relevant to sustainability but not necessarily motivated by it. Further, there is limited evidence that sustainable consumption practices will live on at an integrated mass scale, given a lack of wider institutional effects, such as changes in policy, business strategy, or mass social movements to support them. Instead, we hypothesize that these new consumption experiences “discovered” during the lockdown will live on as practice memories that might be mobilized when the next shock comes.

To address the global problem of single-use plastic waste, tailored behavior change interventions need to be developed which respond to the way different audiences think and act. The current study adopted a behavior-based segmentation approach, underpinned by the theory of normative social behavior and empirical testing, to better understand plastic consumption and the effect of existing media communications. Using a sample of 1001 respondents, Two-Step Cluster Analysis identified two key consumer types: “Plastic Avoiders” and “Plastic Users.” The two groups differed significantly on demographic characteristics, media use/exposure, and theoretical constructs. The most important predictors of group membership were self-efficacy and work status. An experiment involving pre-existing environmental media communications revealed that perceptions, intentions, and behaviors were influenced differently across the two audiences. The findings suggest that mobilizing existing media content may provide a cost-effective way for environmental communicators to increase their public impact while avoiding unintended consequences.

This article explores the complicated place of sugar in the display of family connectedness and health in a white, middle class Australian family. In the context of heightened anxiety about childhood obesity, we present the Baker family as a case study to explore the pleasures and tensions that sugar consumption produces in families. On their birthdays, each child has a luxurious "Hammer Cake" coated in chocolate studded with sweets; simultaneously the family members have also been influenced by the documentary That Sugar Film and check the sugar contents on packages as they shop. We analyze how these pleasures and pressures are balanced: how anxieties about sugar are negotiated and managed in food practices and in the making of family through rituals of celebration. We argue that the concept of "contradictory pleasures," where certain foods are seen as "excess," but mobilized for celebration, offers a nuanced and valuable framework to illuminate simultaneously negative and positive attitudes toward certain foods in family food practices and how families navigate multiple influences on these practices, including popular culture and public health discourses.

Plastic pollution is a critical global sustainability challenge, but the social norms associated with single‐use plastics are changing. These new norms could be encouraging consumer behaviour change by highlighting which behaviours are common and acceptable. This paper explores the role of social norms in predicting plastic avoidance, using the theory of normative social behaviour (TNSB). A representative survey (n = 1,001) was conducted measuring consumer behaviour in relation to four single‐use plastic items (bags, straws, coffee cups, and take‐away containers). Descriptive norms were found to be the strongest predictor of plastic avoidance and most of the remaining variables moderated the norm‐behaviour relationship. However, the relative importance of each variable differed depending on the specific item and behaviour. These findings indicate that there is an opportunity to use social norm messaging to close the perception‐action gap among consumers in order to address a global sustainability problem.