In a new, open-access article in Environment and Planning A, Jon Silver considers the low-carbon restructuring of the waste system in Mbale, Uganda, a town struggling to address its socio-ecological futures. Silver asserts that an Urban Political Ecology approach to how urban carbon governance is materialised advances three particular concerns; the governing of urban circulation, carbon capital and socio-material relations. Through examining these, the paper shows how global actors are increasingly involved in low-carbon transformation, use places such as Mbale as spaces of experimentation, and dominate the governing of this restructuring. Yet out of such unjust processes new forms of contestation and low-carbon politics may emerge.