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Paper short abstract

This paper examines outsourcing and monopolizing as state strategies that define payable labour and unpayable care. Drawing on surrogacy and live-in care in the Netherlands, it shows how care is simultaneously delegated, restricted, and morally contained.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines outsourcing and monopolizing as two interconnected ways through which states govern care, labour, and responsibility, defining what counts as payable labour and what must remain unpayable care. While outsourcing disperses work across social, legal, or geographical boundaries, monopolizing care refers to the restrictive regulation and moral containment of certain forms of care that limit their circulation as labour.

Drawing on ethnographic research on surrogacy and live-in care in the Netherlands, the paper shows how these strategies operate simultaneously. Live-in care is structurally outsourced, often to migrant workers, yet legally segmented and only partially recognized as labour. Surrogacy, by contrast, is tightly monopolized through legal and moral frameworks that prohibit commercial exchange and frame reproductive care as exceptional and altruistic. In both cases, the state plays a central role in setting the limits of outsourceability by determining which aspects of care may be delegated and remunerated.

Responding to the panel’s focus on the goods and bads of outsourcing, the paper argues that outsourcing cannot be understood without attending to parallel processes of monopolization. Rather than opposing dynamics, they are mutually constitutive mechanisms through which care is governed, inequalities are reproduced, and responsibility is unevenly distributed.