Environment and Planning A 1995, volume 27, pages 1419-1435 Managing local mixed economies of care J Charlesworth School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, England J Clarke, A Cochrane Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA Received 6 April 1994; in revised form 30 July 1994 Abstract. It is widely agreed that there has been a move within the United Kingdom away from one welfare state as traditionally understood towards a mixed economy of welfare, in which public, private, voluntary, and not-for-profit sectors are expected to work together. How the new mixed economy is expected to work is less clear. In this paper we focus on two crucial aspects of the change with respect to care services—in emergent local mixed economies of care—with the help of case studies drawn from Buckinghamshire and Birmingham. We stress the need to recog- nise the role of local differences in the construction and interpretation of mixed economies of care, so that there is not just one, but may be many (locally distinctive) mixed economies. And we emphasise the need to take into account the rise of managerialism as a means of dealing with problems of coordination within local mixed economies, particularly because of the way in which it may undermine alternative forms of coordination and control. Within the restructuring of welfare in the United Kingdom over the last fifteen years, the idea of a 'mixed economy of welfare' has come to occupy an increasingly central position in social policy debates. It is most closely associated with neocon- servative attempts to break up what has been identified as the 'monopoly-provider' role of the welfare state by promoting alternative sources of welfare provision. Although such arguments have significantly overstated the extent of the state's monopoly position (and systematically underestimated the unpaid work of carers— mainly women—within the home), the effect of the resulting policy changes has been to shift the balance of provision away from public sector agencies towards private, voluntary, and informal sources of welfare (Langan and Clarke, 1993; Wistow et al, 1994). The restructuring of welfare provision by Conservative governments since 1979 has been directed to the pursuit of multiple (and not always compatible) objectives: cost containment, the introduction of 'marketised' relationships, the promotion of 'family responsibility' rather than 'state dependency', as well as breaking the estab- lished connections between the state and social welfare. These general tendencies can be seen in the development of community care policy through the 1990 National Health Service and Community Care Act, which introduced the structures of an internal market into health care and established new principles for the organi- sation of community care. These centred on a 'lead-agency' role for local authority social services departments (SSDs), which have been given responsibility for assess- ing needs and organising the provision of care. This included the expectation that they would move away from a role as direct service providers, becoming instead the 'purchasers' of care services within an expanded 'mixed economy' made up of diverse and competing sources of care. The 1990 Act also placed a premium on informal care by family and friends, pushing SSDs towards supporting rather than supplanting the work of primary carers.