1 MARKETIZATION, COMMODIFICATION AND PRIVATIZATION OF CARE SERVICES Tiina Vaittinen, Hanna-Kaisa Hoppania & Olli Karsio [This is the pre-print version of a chapter published in The Handbook of International Political Economy and Gender, edited by Juanita Elias & Adrienne Roberts, Edward Elgar Press.] INTRODUCTION Care, whether approached in terms of labour, practices, needs or morality, is a deeply feminized field of political economy. Drawing on the feminist ethics of care tradition on one hand and on feminist literature on reproductive labour on the other, feminist scholars have highlighted the (hidden) centrality of gendered and relational care work to the operation of the international political economy (see also Arat-Koç, Onuki and Raghuram & Kofman in this volume). In much of this literature, care is analysed in terms of feminized, classed and racialized labour, which in the capitalist world economy becomes transnationally commodified as nannies, nurses and careworkers migrate, often across the globe, from poorer societies to richer ones (Onuki, this volume). In this chapter, we seek to expand the discussion of transnationally commodified care in IPE, by turning to the neoliberal restructuration of the welfare state, and its connections with transnational capitalism in the field of care. We understand care in somewhat broader terms than as reproductive labour (cf. Onuki, this volume), approaching it as the micro- and macro-level services, structures and practices designed for the provisioning of care needs of (often nationally defined) populations. The commodification and marketization of care in turn, refer to the ways in which these services, structures and practices are moulded into market products and commodities, the trade of which not only serves the care needs of the populations but also the accumulation of transnational capital. Thus, instead of examining care as a form of reproductive labour, we perceive the labour of care provisioning as only one aspect of care, which is complemented by various agents and structures that allow for the formation of certain types of care relations while disabling others (cf. Tronto 1993: 105–115). Our perspective is not competitive with, or supplementary to the existing literature. Rather, our broader definition of care is a complementary perspective that builds on and contributes to the previous literatures. We argue that understanding care in terms of services, structures and practices designed for the provisioning of care needs is important, because it allows us to further