This short paper shows how 'neoliberal globalization' is reworked from within by local actors who appropriate its symbols, practices, and ideas—often for ends extrinsic to the logic underpinning them at the origins. In Cairo, public-private partnerships with European waste management companies—a new development over the past decade—are not merely 'neoliberalism from the sky.' They incorporate longstanding aesthetic and symbolic concerns over 'cleanliness' and 'modernity,' recasting them in a vogue idiom, one that plays well with international funders.