BIEN entered its fourth decade with a closed bank account. It leaves it with a global definition, a generation of experiments, and a sovereign state paying a recurring income. The distance between those moments explains what the network became.
In 2016, the idea of basic income looked healthier than the institution carrying its global name.
That June, Switzerland held the world’s first national referendum on an unconditional basic income. The proposal lost by a wide margin, with 23.1 percent voting yes, but more than half a million people had backed an idea that had spent decades outside ordinary politics. A movement that once struggled to find a meeting room could now point to a national ballot.
Inside the Basic Income Earth Network, Malcolm Torry found a less celebratory story. BIEN had invited him to join its Executive Committee. He studied the organization before answering and initially refused.
"The bank account had been closed by the bank," Torry recalled for BIEN’s 40th-anniversary oral-history project. BIEN had "a chaotic constitution," remained registered in Belgium without anyone properly administering the entity, and had been fined for breaking Belgian tax law. "The future looked bleak."
Then he took on the problem. Torry became BIEN’s unpaid general manager and began the work that movements rarely celebrate: rewriting statutes, closing the Belgian registration, establishing a legal home in the United Kingdom, opening working bank accounts, and building the administrative structure needed to accept grants. He later described his contribution with blunt accuracy: "Rescuing BIEN from extinction and leaving it in robust administrative and financial health."
The rescue held. BIEN’s new Charitable Incorporated Organisation was registered in the United Kingdom on 8 February 2018. That legal fact would have sounded painfully mundane during the referendum summer of 2016. It turned out to be one of the decade’s defining achievements.
BIEN was about to face a problem that successful movements eventually meet. Obscurity had protected the idea from distortion. Popularity would not. Governments, charities, political campaigns, researchers, and technology companies were beginning to use the phrase "basic income" for policies that differed sharply in who received money, how often it arrived, whether it was conditional, and whether anyone could plan around it.
BIEN needed to survive long enough to explain the difference.
Figure. Fourth-decade milestones, 2016-2026: institutional repair, political breakthroughs, pandemic-era cash, regional expansion, ENRA, and the 25th BIEN Congress in Toronto.
Five words for a crowded decade
That argument came to a head at the 2016 BIEN Congress in Seoul.
Group photo of participants at the 16th BIEN Congress in Seoul, July 2016. Source: BIEN Congress archive, via Ritsumeikan University.
For thirty years, BIEN had described basic income as an income granted to all, individually, without a means test or work requirement. The wording carried the moral core. It still left practical questions. Was a one-time cheque a basic income? What about food vouchers? A household payment? A temporary trial? Could a means-tested transfer qualify if there was no work condition?
A workshop of roughly thirty people tried to reconcile competing proposals. The discussion continued through breaks, into the evening, and the following morning. Louise Haagh warned against losing BIEN’s character as a "very broad church of plural debate". Some participants wanted adequacy inside the definition so governments could not relabel a token payment as basic income. Others feared that an adequacy test would exclude partial basic incomes that could become steps toward something larger.
Figure. The Seoul Definition (2016): BIEN’s five-part test for basic income (periodic, cash, individual, universal, and unconditional) and the adjacent policies those criteria exclude.
The same meeting adopted a separate political resolution. A majority supported an income stable in size and frequency, high enough alongside social services to help eliminate material poverty and enable participation. It also opposed replacing services or entitlements when the result would make vulnerable people worse off. The division of labor was useful. The definition established what the policy was. The resolution stated what most members wanted a good version of it to achieve.
Seoul also showed how far the network had spread. The General Assembly recognized six new affiliates, including networks in India, New Zealand, Quebec, Scotland, China, and Taiwan. A motion requiring annual congresses failed, but Lisbon was approved for 2017 and Tampere for 2018. An annual rhythm took hold anyway.
The five-part definition became one of BIEN’s most valuable pieces of infrastructure. The philosophical argument continued, but the tests made it easier to conduct honestly. A payment could be generous, humane, and worth studying while still failing one or more of the tests. That distinction mattered more with every new pilot and every new headline.
BIEN’s five-part definition distinguishes a basic income from adjacent cash policies. The comparison uses program rules in place during the periods discussed in this article.
What the pilots actually showed
On 1 January 2017, two thousand unemployed people in Finland began receiving EUR 560 a month. They did not have to prove that they were looking for work, and the payment continued if they found a job. The experiment was randomized and administered nationwide, but participants came from a defined group of unemployment-benefit recipients. It did not test a universal income across Finnish society.
For Sini Marttinen, selection felt like "winning the lottery." "You lose the bureaucracy, the reporting," she told The Guardian. She later opened a restaurant with two friends. Journalist Tuomas Muraja used the period to write and publish books. These stories gave the experiment a human scale before the final tables arrived.
The employment result was modest. The groups barely differed in the first year. In the second, recipients worked about six additional days, but Finland introduced an activation regime that changed conditions for the control group and made the second-year employment result difficult to attribute. Recipients reported greater life satisfaction, less mental strain, and more economic security. Later register research added a harder measure: the experiment reduced psychotropic drug use by 8 to 11 percent, while finding no significant effects on other measured health outcomes.
Finland became a lesson in the distance between the experiment the public imagined and the one the government designed. It mainly tested whether removing benefit withdrawal and job-search conditions would improve employment among unemployed people. It offered little guidance on what a permanent universal income, financed through the tax system and paid across the whole population, would do.
Ontario exposed another limit. A pilot can be rigorous on paper and still collapse under ordinary politics.
Launched in 2017, the Ontario Basic Income Pilot paid about four thousand low-income adults in Hamilton, Brantford, Lindsay, and Thunder Bay. The benefit was income-tested and adjusted for couples, which placed it outside BIEN’s definition. Participants cared more about what changed in their daily lives. Interviews later captured the feeling in one sentence: "I was trusted for once". People described stable housing, better food, transportation, glasses they were willing to wear, and enough room to consider school or a different job.
A new provincial government cancelled the three-year pilot early and wound down payments by March 2019. Participants had signed leases, enrolled in courses, and reorganized work around the government’s promise. The cancellation did more than destroy a research design. It shifted the cost of political reversal onto people who had been asked to trust the state.
Stockton, California, offered a smaller study with a different causal story. Beginning in February 2019, the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration gave 125 randomly selected residents $500 a month for 24 months. After one year, full-time employment among recipients rose from 28 to 40 percent, compared with 32 to 37 percent in the control group. The project linked that movement to the practical capacity to train, interview, or accept a temporary loss of earnings. One participant explained that the money made it possible to leave a job and take the risk required to pursue an internship.
Anxiety and depression measures improved. Most tracked debit-card spending went to food, household goods, utilities, and transportation. Less than one percent of tracked purchases went to alcohol or tobacco, although cash withdrawals and transfers meant the card data could not describe every dollar a household spent.
Figure. The pilot becomes a genre: major fourth-decade basic-income and guaranteed-income experiments, their headline findings, and the limits of what each design can establish.
Kenya’s GiveDirectly study pushed hardest on time. About 23,000 people across the treatment villages entered arms that included twelve years of monthly payments, two years of monthly payments, or a large lump sum. The long-term group was promised $22.50 a month for twelve years. After the first two years, the long-term and short-term monthly groups had received similar amounts. The remaining ten-year promise allowed researchers to ask whether a credible future changed present behavior.
It did. The long-term commitment encouraged more saving and investment than the two-year stream. The lump sum produced the largest immediate gains on many economic measures, including enterprise creation, while monthly payments performed better on some measures of food variety and depression. The study found no reduction in total labor supply. Its sharper lesson concerned design. Duration and payment cadence change behavior. A two-year experiment may miss what permanence does, while a lump sum can outperform a short monthly stream when people need capital rather than cash flow.
The largest U.S. randomized study brought another layer of restraint. OpenResearch enrolled three thousand low-income adults in Texas and Illinois. One thousand received $1,000 a month for three years, while two thousand received $50. Recipients increased spending, especially on housing, food, and transportation. They also had more ability to support relatives and more freedom to search for work that fit their goals.
Average work fell modestly, by roughly one to two hours a week depending on the specification, and employment was slightly lower. Improvements in stress and food security appeared early and then faded. Researchers found no durable population-level improvement in physical health. For Belle, a participant with disabilities facing unstable housing, the transfer still had an immediate meaning: "It was just a lifeline".
Taken together, the studies complicated both sides’ favorite story. Income security repeatedly reduced scarcity and administrative pressure. Employment effects ranged from small positives to modest reductions. Mental-health effects were stronger in some settings and temporary in others. The findings depended on who was included, the amount, the payment schedule, the institutions surrounding the transfer, and what happened when the study ended.
A pilot can generate evidence without reproducing the political guarantee, tax system, universality, or permanence of a national basic income.
The projects differed sharply in scale, duration, eligibility, and political status. Participant counts are approximate and the vertical axis is logarithmic so small and large studies can appear together.
The lunch that put basic income on presidential television
Research was only one route into public life. Another began over lunch.
In 2017, Scott Santens met Andrew Yang at Cochon Butcher in New Orleans. Yang told him he was considering a presidential campaign. He had asked what someone with his background could do to move the basic-income movement furthest, and concluded that a presidential run could force the country to hear the idea.
Santens set a benchmark that felt audacious at the time. "If he could make it to just one national televised debate," Santens recalled telling him, and ensure basic income came up, "that such an event would be a huge win for the movement."
Yang’s Freedom Dividend, $1,000 a month for every American adult, gave the campaign a recognizable center. The "Yang Gang" carried it through podcasts, memes, town halls, and rallies. At the 2019 Basic Income March in New York, Santens remembers that most attendees had entered through the campaign. A policy associated with academic workshops became a political identity people wore on hats and printed on signs.
The campaign arrived during a publishing wave. Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght’s Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy developed the case around real freedom. Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists made the idea accessible to a mass audience. Annie Lowrey’s Give People Money approached it through reporting on poverty, technology, and the welfare state. The books disagreed on design and strategy. Together they made basic income legible to readers far outside BIEN.
Mainstream attention brought distortion with it. Automation forecasts became campaign certainty. "UBI" turned into a label for tax credits, stimulus cheques, local guaranteed-income pilots, and cryptocurrency projects. Arguments about replacing the welfare state were often attached to the whole idea even though basic-income advocates disagreed fiercely among themselves.
Miriam Laker encountered BIEN during this louder period and noticed a quieter habit. She was struck by "how the BIEN leaders listen with open minds to other opinions" while continuing to advocate among naysayers. That culture mattered. A network built as a broad church now had to welcome disagreement while insisting that words retain meaning.
Figure. Three BIEN contributors remember the fourth decade from inside it.
Malcolm Torry, Scott Santens, and Miriam Laker described survival, mainstream attention, and the habits needed to keep a wide movement in conversation.
A crisis reveals the value of systems already built
The crisis made the moral intuition behind basic income easy to grasp. When an external shock destroys earnings, people still need food, rent, medicine, and the ability to stay home. It also revealed the cost of proving need in real time. Countries with working identification systems, registries, and payment rails moved faster. Others asked newly unemployed people to navigate overwhelmed offices and broken portals.
Most pandemic transfers still failed BIEN’s five-part test. They were one-off rather than periodic, household-based rather than individual, means-tested rather than universal, or tied to previous earnings. Some were broad enough to feel universal, but remained emergency measures. Calling every pandemic cheque a basic income made the movement sound more victorious than it was and blurred the reasons some programs reached people quickly while others did not.
Marica, Brazil, showed what changed when an income system already existed.
By late 2019, the municipality’s Citizens’ Basic Income paid 130 mumbucas per person each month to about 42,500 low-income residents. One mumbuca was pegged to one Brazilian real and circulated through a local digital-currency network. The program used the federal social registry and an income threshold, so it was not universal under BIEN’s definition. Benefits were calculated per person but usually delivered through family cards.
When COVID-19 arrived, Marica already had recipients, records, and a payment channel. In April 2020, it raised the transfer from 130 to 300 mumbucas, an increase of about 130 percent. Researchers describe this as a "dial up, dial down" model: keep a permanent floor in place, then raise it rapidly when a crisis hits.
For massage therapist Luciana de Souza Nunes, the local currency was concrete. "I use the mumbuca mainly at the supermarket and at the pharmacy, to buy the basics," she told El Pais. Her work income could cover other bills. Because the currency circulated among local merchants, the transfer also supported shops while residents stayed home.
In 2025, BIEN held its 24th Congress in Marica and neighboring Niteroi under the theme "Basic Income & Solidarity Economy." A municipal program once treated as peripheral had become a place where the global network could study the interaction among income, local currency, public services, oil revenue, and regional development.
Eduardo Suplicy at the 24th BIEN Congress in Brazil, August 2025. Source: BIEN’s Congress photo gallery.
The pandemic’s strongest lesson was institutional. A standing, trusted, technically functional income floor can be increased quickly when disaster arrives. Permanence is a form of preparedness.
BIEN learns how to survive attention
BIEN’s own development followed the same logic. Infrastructure built before a crisis determines what an organization can do when attention surges.
The 2018 UK registration gave BIEN a stable legal entity that could hold funds, sign agreements, and survive changes in volunteer leadership. The achievement belonged to Torry’s rescue work, but the culture around the handoff also mattered. At the 2019 Congress in Hyderabad, Sarath Davala tried to persuade Torry to stand for chair. Torry spent the meeting persuading Davala instead. "I won," Torry recalled. Davala later stood for chair and succeeded Louise Haagh in 2020. Torry’s conclusion was simple: "He has been brilliant."
A gathering from Karl Widerquist’s submitted BIEN photo archive. Photo submitted to BIEN’s 40th Anniversary Oral History Project.
In 2022, BIEN secured a three-year grant from the Mustardseed Trust to strengthen its international presence and regional Hubs. For the first time in its thirty-six-year history, BIEN launched a formal fundraising appeal. The grant supported paid regional work, but much of it required matching funds. Professionalization therefore created a second task: building a donor base broad enough that one grant would not become a new form of fragility.
BIEN’s Hubs page, checked on 7 August 2026, reports activity across three regions, 99 countries, 70 partner organizations, and ten regional events. The figures describe regional reach rather than ninety-nine mature national affiliates. They still reveal a different organizational ambition. "Earth" could no longer mean a European-centered network that occasionally welcomed visitors. Regional leadership had to influence the agenda and bring forms of insecurity into the conversation that wealthy-country debates often miss.
Professionalization carries risks. Paid staff can concentrate authority. Grant cycles can reshape priorities. A more visible organization can become cautious or dependent on a few people. Volunteer romanticism is a poor answer. BIEN’s condition in 2016 showed where informal systems can end. The practical answer is better institutional design: distributed authority, published evidence, preserved records, recurring leadership handoffs, and finances strong enough to survive disagreement.
The decade linked organizational repair, public attention, emergency cash, regional expansion, and the first long-term sovereign program explicitly designed as a basic income.
The Marshall Islands crosses the line from pilot to policy
One of the decade’s most interesting basic income policy stories began far from the countries that had dominated the debate.
The Republic of the Marshall Islands executed its first ENRA distributions on 26 November 2025. More than 33,000 citizens registered for the first round, the largest national outreach effort in the country’s history across twenty-four atoll communities. Payments reached people through direct deposit, paper cheques, and a small pilot of the Lomalo digital wallet designed for communities with limited banking infrastructure.
Figure. Marshall Islands ENRA, 2025-2026: the move from pilot to permanent national policy, including enrollment, delivery systems, residence rules, inflation pressure, and budget durability.
The initial payment was about US$200 per person, or roughly US$800 a year. For Iohaan Anjolok, a paralegal worker in Majuro living with his wife and two children, four individual entitlements became meaningful household cash flow. "We save half and use the other half on expenses," he told ABC. He called the payment a morale boost in a country where many workers earn less than US$200 a week.
ENRA is funded from the Compact Trust Fund created through the Marshall Islands’ relationship with the United States. The government’s white paper reported more than US$1.3 billion in trust-fund assets in mid-2025, with further contributions committed through 2027. That funding is rooted in a difficult history. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted sixty-seven nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands. Compact finance, military access, climate vulnerability, high food costs, and outward migration all sit behind the government’s language of shared prosperity.
The program is already showing what happens when a permanent entitlement meets a fixed appropriation. Enrollment rose above 41,000 and the March 2026 payment fell to about US$160 because the annual allocation had to be shared among more eligible people. Administrators also delayed the distribution while checking whether registrants still met the residence rule and reviewing exemptions for students, medical referrals, and diplomatic staff.
The May 2026 payment was supplemented to about US$200 during an energy-price emergency, and the late-August payment is scheduled to receive the same supplement. The government proposed a larger appropriation for fiscal year 2027 to keep the payment near that level. In June 2026, the World Bank reported that fuel costs had tripled and inflation was projected at 8.6 percent, with families facing higher prices for electricity, food, and transport. A fixed nominal benefit had entered a moving economy.
Those complications are the policy. Universality requires a rule about who belongs. Regularity requires a budget that survives enrollment changes and market returns. Digital access requires connectivity, merchants, literacy, and fallback channels. Adequacy has to be defended against inflation. A permanent program creates obligations that a pilot can postpone.
ENRA will not solve housing shortages, climate risk, imported food costs, health needs, or the nuclear legacy. Its annual value remains modest. It may still become the clearest demonstration yet of what changes when basic income stops being an experiment and becomes a line in a sovereign budget.
The argument BIEN is here to protect
The fourth decade replaced the hope of a single verdict with better questions and more honest boundaries.
Finland showed that removing conditions and increasing income can improve mental health without producing a dramatic employment surge. Ontario showed that participants bear the risk when a government revokes a promise. Stockton showed how a small cushion can turn volatility into room for action. Kenya showed that the promise of duration changes behavior before future payments arrive. OpenResearch showed that a large transfer can expand choice while leaving many health outcomes unchanged. Marica showed how a standing payment system can become emergency infrastructure. The Marshall Islands is beginning to show what universality, residence, payment systems, inflation, and fiscal durability mean once they are no longer hypothetical.
Across those cases, BIEN’s role is to preserve distinctions: cash and vouchers, individual and household, universal and targeted, unconditional and work-tested, experiment and entitlement, emergency relief and a durable floor. These differences can sound pedantic until a government cancels a pilot, excludes someone through an income test, changes the payment schedule, or substitutes one cheque for security.
The human evidence is less abstract. People used cash for groceries, rent, transport, medicine, children, debt, training, and time to look for something better. The transfer widened the range of decisions they could make, including the power to refuse a bad option.
Santens believes the next decade will be decided by whether permanent policies arrive before artificial intelligence and automation deepen insecurity. Torry’s warning points to the same future from another direction: BIEN must "maintain the integrity of the definition of Basic Income" while the idea spreads.
Forty years after a group of "lonely fighters" built a home for the idea, BIEN now operates without the protection of obscurity. It has to remain broad without becoming meaningless, professional without becoming closed, global without reproducing old centers of power, and hopeful without treating mixed evidence as disloyalty.
BIEN is scheduled to gather in Toronto from 19 to 22 August 2026 for its 25th Congress, with the main Congress program at Toronto Metropolitan University from 20 to 22 August, focused on basic income and the polycrisis. The world facing that congress is rich in cash-transfer experiments. Durable institutions remain scarce.
The decade began with a closed bank account. It ends with a sovereign country placing a recurring payment inside its national machinery. Between those points lies the real history of 2016-2026: basic income became impossible to ignore, and BIEN had to become capable of carrying the weight of being heard.
Acknowledgment
This article draws on responses submitted to BIEN’s 40th Anniversary Oral History Project by Malcolm Torry, Scott Santens, Miriam Laker, and Karl Widerquist, alongside official records, journalism, books, and academic research.
Core sources
These sources anchor the central historical, research, and policy claims in this retrospective.
From Cape Town to Seoul, basic income’s third decade became a story about people trying to make an old idea survive contact with real lives. Cash entered villages, researchers debated what it showed, and BIEN became a genuinely global movement.
At the close of the 2006 BIEN Congress in Cape Town, Zephania Kameeta struck the podium with his fist. Karl Widerquist remembers the Namibian bishop repeating three words, “Words, words, words,” then announcing that the coalition he led had secured enough support to begin building a basic-income pilot. The full budget and practical work were not finished, but the point landed. After years of arguing that everyone should have an income floor, somebody in the room was preparing to put cash in people’s hands.
The moment landed because BIEN itself had just crossed a border. Two years earlier, the network had replaced “European” with “Earth” in its name, and Cape Town was its first congress outside Europe. A worldwide name now had to answer a harder question: Could basic income leave conference rooms without losing the intellectual care that had kept it alive?
The next ten years produced a messier and more important story than a straight march from theory to proof. Namibian churches and labor organizers built a village-wide demonstration. Brazilian campaigners tried to turn a legal promise into a lived right. Women organizers and researchers in Madhya Pradesh built one of the period’s strongest comparative studies. Korean academics and activists turned a new network into a public coalition, while Swiss campaigners turned eight million coins into a national argument. BIEN did not run this work. It became one of the places where the people, evidence, failures, and ambitions could meet.
Related negative-income-tax experiments had already been conducted in the United States and Canada from 1968 to 1980. What changed after 2006 was the emergence of a more global generation of village-scale pilots and comparative studies.
That changed the debate. Before 2006, the movement’s strongest arguments were often philosophical. By 2016, those arguments had names, payment schedules, local committees, control villages, critics, failed campaigns, and people who knew what it felt like to plan around money that arrived every month. Basic income became more credible because people tried it, and more complicated for exactly the same reason.
The village behind the words
Kameeta’s speech was the visible part of a campaign already years in motion. A Namibian tax commission had recommended a national grant in 2002. Churches, trade unions, AIDS organizations, youth groups, legal advocates, and labor researchers then built the Basic Income Grant Coalition. Kameeta gave the demand a moral voice, but the pilot rested on slower work: meetings, fundraising, local trust, and a coalition broad enough to keep the proposal alive.
From January 2008 through December 2009, each person registered as living in Otjivero-Omitara in July 2007 and below age 60 received N$100 per month without a poverty test or work requirement. The eligible population was roughly one thousand people. Older residents were already covered by Namibia’s pension system.
Before the first payment, residents formed an 18-member committee, and local alcohol sellers agreed not to sell on payday. In the coalition’s report, resident Jonas Damaseb said the grant had “brought life to our place.” At the report’s launch, Kameeta told listeners not to think of “people receiving N$100,” but of “people receiving their dignity.” The language was sweeping, but the changes residents described were ordinary: food in the house, school costs paid, a clinic visit made before a crisis. That was why the pilot traveled so far. It joined a small amount of money to a place people could picture and to lives that had changed enough for residents to describe the difference themselves.
The N$100 was small enough to dismiss from a distance. Inside a household with no cushion, regularity changed what the amount could do. The project reports described more food security, better school participation, greater clinic use, and new local economic activity. The grant was far too small to make people rich, yet it made some decisions less desperate.
Researchers were finding better language for the same change. Tania Burchardt argued that income matters partly because it changes a person’s command over time. Karl Widerquist framed freedom as the effective power to say no. Almaz Zelleke asked what an individual income could mean for people doing unpaid care. In Otjivero, those ideas appeared as ordinary choices made under slightly less pressure: food today, a school expense paid on time, a clinic visit before illness worsened, or a small decision made without asking another person for permission.
The pilot also showed that universality does not happen by declaring it. Somebody had to decide who counted as a resident, create the list, deliver the money, and notice who had been missed. Jürgen De Wispelaere and Lindsay Stirton later described these as the hidden administrative bottlenecks of a supposedly simple idea. In Otjivero, they were the difference between a right discussed and money received.
Then came the argument over what the pilot had proved. The coalition’s before-and-after reports described major improvements. Rigmar Osterkamp’s peer-reviewed critique accepted the severity of the poverty and the reality of the payments, but challenged the causal claims. The settlement had been deliberately selected, there was no randomized comparison group, and the coalition running the project also produced its most influential evaluation.
The disagreement became part of the movement’s education. Residents’ testimony deserved to be heard without turning every improvement into proof. One village could show that a payment was possible and reveal what people did with it. It could not settle how a national program would affect taxes, prices, migration, or public services.
The argument now had a more durable intellectual home. Basic Income Studies launched in 2006, putting advocates, philosophers, administrators, and critics in the same conversation. Erik Olin Wright used its first volume to ask how basic income might shift power between workers and employers. Daniel Raventós argued that formal rights mean little without material independence. The journal kept the practical turn honest by giving it somewhere to be challenged.
The hardest lesson came at the end. The formal N$100 pilot stopped after two years. An N$80 monthly bridge allowance began in January 2010, but regular funding was exhausted after the February 2012 payment, and the national grant never arrived. Families that had started planning around a dependable payment were returned to uncertainty before the politics had caught up. The decade would repeat this pattern: evidence could move faster than institutions.
Otjivero changed the movement without proving the policy. It gave residents direct experience, organizers hard-won knowledge about delivery, advocates a story the world could understand, and critics a clearer target. Kameeta had asked for action. Action answered with both hope and limits.
Selected milestones in basic-income experiments, public action, and BIEN’s global development, 2006-2016.
A movement learns to travel
Brazil showed another version of the distance between promise and permanence. Law No. 10.835 created a statutory commitment to an annual monetary benefit for Brazilians and qualifying long-term foreign residents, while delegating the amount and phased rollout to the executive. The commitment was never fully regulated or universally implemented during this period. Universality existed as a legal destination; the operating welfare state remained targeted and conditional.
On 29 June 2010, the day before BIEN’s São Paulo congress, Senator Eduardo Suplicy brought a BIEN delegation to meet President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula offered no promise of immediate universal implementation. He described how far his government believed it had moved under the country’s political and economic constraints.
Widerquist’s memory of the surrounding week says more about how the idea traveled. Suplicy moved him between presidential access and ordinary public life. People stopped the senator in the street. Students refused to let him speak until he sang “Blowin’ in the Wind.” At a crowded union meeting on São Paulo’s outskirts, Suplicy suddenly asked his non-Portuguese-speaking guest to address the room.
Widerquist remembers saying something close to this: “I support UBI because it’s wrong for anyone to come between someone else and the resources they need to survive.” Suplicy translated. The room applauded. A sentence developed inside the basic-income debate had survived a crossing between language, class, and experience, and Widerquist carried it with him afterward.
That was what BIEN’s new geography could do at its best. A technical proposal had to make sense in a union hall, while the moral intuition voiced there had to travel back into the movement’s language. Going global required more than placing a European argument on new stages. New audiences began changing what the argument had to explain.
Karl Widerquist (right) during a visit connected to ReCivitas in Brazil. Photo submitted to BIEN’s 40th Anniversary Oral History Project.
Brazil also produced a smaller, quieter, privately funded basic-income implementation project. On 25 October 2008, Bruna Augusto Pereira and Marcus Vinicius Brancaglione began a privately funded payment in Quatinga Velho, starting with 27 residents. ReCivitas described participants as “never considered objects of study, nor beneficiaries, but citizens.” Looking back at the first hand-to-hand payments, the group wrote that “the idea of basic income came out of the paper.” Payment itself was the civic act. It was not designed as a controlled experiment; putting the principle into practice came first, while research was secondary.
The project had little power to isolate causal effects, and private donations could never stand in for national finance. Its value lay elsewhere. Brazil already had a law pointing toward a universal right, yet a handful of organizers still had to enact the principle person by person. The project exposed one of the decade’s recurring truths: a right can be universal in language and tiny in practice.
The Madhya Pradesh pilots started from a different question. ReCivitas treated payment as the act; the Indian work was designed to ask what happened after the money arrived. Planning and baseline work began in 2009 and 2010. The regular phase ran from June 2011 through May 2012, followed by increased payments from July through November 2012. Eight villages received grants and twelve served as controls. About 6,000 people in the eight main treatment villages were paid; a separate, smaller tribal-village pilot used a related design.
Adults initially received 200 rupees a month and children 100, with later increases to 300 and 150. Entire villages were assigned, not individual households, partly to avoid resentment and constant pressure to share between neighbors. The design was more rigorous than Otjivero’s, but it still depended on social judgment and fieldwork.
The Self-Employed Women’s Association made that design real. SEWA organizers helped build recipient lists, open accounts, explain the grant, and repair exclusions. A village-wide entitlement still came down to names, residency, bank access, repeated delivery, and a person willing to notice that somebody had been left out.
The results were broad but not magical. Researchers reported gains in nutrition, schooling, productive assets, sanitation, debt management, and movement from casual wage labor toward own-account work. A peer-reviewed analysis of 2,034 households found 46 percent lower adjusted odds of non-hospitalizing illness or injury, while finding no measurable effect on serious illness or hospitalization during the study period and no effect on vaccination, which was already high. The analysis used propensity-score adjustment after baseline-data problems, including misplaced questionnaires. The mixed pattern made the evidence harder to reduce to propaganda.
The most revealing evidence arrived in small sentences. Kalabai described pooling payments before the monsoon to repair her home: “Thankfully, at the right time we had this money” (Davala et al., p. 78). A woman explained why receiving money through an account of her own still mattered: “We have enough material goods,” one said, “but we do not own anything ourselves, not even a bank account. It is a small independence for us” (Davala et al., p. 168). These were stories about timing and individual control. They were about money arriving before the rain and about receiving something in one’s own name.
Years later, when a reporter returned to the villages, Shardabai Dawar remembered, “When the scheme started we thought it would continue forever.” Her sentence captured a risk pilot reports rarely measure. Predictability can change decisions quickly. Its disappearance can be felt just as sharply.
Guy Standing described this as relief from the “contrived scarcity of money” that keeps poor households borrowing on bad terms or selling assets at the wrong time. Kalabai’s roof made the argument concrete. The transfer did not erase inequality. It arrived before the monsoon, when timing became power.
The project’s researchers later organized the findings around welfare, growth, and emancipation. The last word carried the deeper claim. Human development appeared in more food and better schooling, but also in less dependence on moneylenders, casual employers, household gatekeepers, and clogged welfare channels. The amount could remain small while individual receipt and predictable timing changed who had to ask whom.
The pilots still could not simulate a national program. A full-scale system could alter prices, food supply, migration, credit, taxation, and political expectations in ways a time-limited village study could not reproduce. The strongest claim stayed close to the design: this payment, delivered through these institutions, produced these patterns under these conditions.
The decade’s wider literature kept the same boundary in view. Simon Birnbaum argued that basic income had to sit beside public services instead of replacing them. A study published in 2016 from a randomized trial in rural Kenya found higher consumption and psychological well-being after unconditional cash transfers, but it did not test a universal, permanent right. Evidence about cash could strengthen the conversation without answering every question carried by the words basic income.
Research graphic: BIEN congresses and selected basic-income project locations, 2006-2016. Congress chronology follows BIEN’s official history; project locations follow project and research sources.
These stories did not travel on their own. BIEN’s congress route moved from Cape Town in 2006 to Dublin, São Paulo, Ottobrunn, Montréal, and Seoul. The route changed more than the location of a conference. It changed who hosted, who counted as an expert, and whose experience entered the movement’s archive.
Between congresses, Yannick Vanderborght carried out quieter work as BIEN’s newsletter editor. He remembers contacting members “from all corners of the world” to collect and digest developments from their countries. That editorial labor gave a widening network a way to recognize itself between meetings. The website could move information faster, but people still had to decide what was worth carrying forward.
São Paulo showed how human and improvised the network remained. BIEN’s contemporary report counted more than 300 participants from over 30 countries; a later recollection placed the crowd above 500 and the presentations near 200. The schedule even made room for the Brazil-Netherlands World Cup match. Participants returned to the sessions after Brazil’s defeat, the kind of detail institutional histories usually lose and actual communities remember.
A movement becomes global when its knowledge stops moving in one direction. Namibian church and labor organizers, Brazilian rights campaigners, Indian women’s organizers, Korean scholars and students, and Swiss citizen-campaigners were no longer colorful examples attached to a theory developed elsewhere. Their work changed the theory’s questions.
Korea made that shift visible. The Basic Income Korean Network formed in 2009, and at its major inaugural conference in January 2010, papers appeared in Korean and English in two volumes totaling about 600 pages, and a Seoul Declaration gathered more than 600 academic and activist signatures.
Within months, a Basic Income Coalition brought together 50 civil organizations and more than 770 people to support candidates in local elections. Publishing, translation, coalition-building, and electoral intervention formed one sequence. Korean organizers were building a political language for their own society, not importing a finished doctrine. The global turn became real when local movements could reshape the argument rather than simply join it.
Five words for a larger movement
In October 2013, Swiss campaigners placed eight million five-rappen coins outside the Federal Palace, one for each resident, as they submitted the signatures for a popular initiative. It was movement theater with constitutional consequences.
Campaigners publicly discussed CHF2,500 per adult per month, but the constitutional initiative itself specified neither an amount nor a financing mechanism. On 5 June 2016, voters rejected it by 76.9 percent to 23.1 percent. The defeat was decisive. The fact that the proposal had reached a national ballot was also extraordinary.
Switzerland showed how far the movement’s reach had grown and how much politics remained unresolved. Attention had outrun agreement on the payment level, financing, migration, public services, and transition. The same success that made basic income visible also made the label easier to stretch.
One month later, BIEN met in Seoul for its first congress in Asia. After a decade of pilots, campaigns, cash-transfer studies, and competing proposals, the network faced a basic institutional question. What exactly was everyone talking about?
Karl Widerquist speaking at a basic-income gathering in Seoul on 17 June 2015, one year before BIEN’s first Congress in Asia. Photo submitted to BIEN’s 40th Anniversary Oral History Project.
The General Assembly amended its statutory definition in what BIEN described as a clarification. A basic income was “a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement”. The amendment explicitly added periodicity and cash, while participants differed on whether it was a clarification or a substantive change. The explanation named five characteristics: periodic, cash, individual, universal, and unconditional.
Those five characteristics created a boundary sturdy enough for a larger movement. One-off checks, vouchers tied to a use, household benefits, means-tested payments, and work-conditioned transfers could be related policies without becoming basic income by default. Definition-making had become a response to success. Once politicians, charities, journalists, and researchers all wanted the label, the network had to protect a shared vocabulary.
The process was movement work in its own right. Competing proposals were discussed in a workshop, a compromise reached the Assembly, and members approved a nonbinding resolution opposing service cuts that would worsen the position of vulnerable people. BIEN also formalized its legal structure and moved toward annual congresses. Drafting, listening, archiving, translating, and resolving wording had become part of keeping a worldwide movement functional.
By 2016, BIEN was more than a meeting held every two years, yet it still depended heavily on volunteer labor. Its expansion rested on people who edited newsletters, maintained websites, hosted visitors, assembled payment lists, translated papers, saved records, and accepted the next organizational burden. The institutional story was human too. Movements need people who make the room and preserve the memory after everyone else has gone home.
There is no straight line from Kameeta’s fist to a national basic income. Namibia’s pilot ended without national adoption. Brazil’s legal right remained staged and incomplete. India generated rich evidence without becoming a national program. Switzerland voted no.
A victory story would confuse visibility with power. A dismissal would miss how much the burden of argument had changed. A new generation of projects made basic income tangible to communities and movements far beyond the earlier North American experiments. They had to confront payment systems, recipients, local committees, comparison groups, research limits, campaign defeats, and the institutions needed to make a promise last.
The decade’s deepest human-development insight was simple. Money can change more than purchasing power. It can change time, liquidity, bargaining, privacy, mobility, the ability to repair a roof before the rain, and the freedom to make an ordinary purchase without asking permission. Those gains may be modest, uneven, and reversible. They still belong to development.
The movement changed just as deeply. People in the Global South ceased to appear mainly as future beneficiaries of a proposal formulated elsewhere. They became organizers, method-makers, critics, translators, campaigners, and authors whose work changed the questions BIEN carried into the next congress.
Kameeta’s complaint about words was never a complaint about thought. It was a demand that thought acquire consequences. The strongest work of 2006–2016 answered by paying people, listening closely, measuring carefully, exposing the limits, and refusing to treat a pilot as a permanent settlement.
Ten years after Cape Town, basic income had become something people could receive, organize around, challenge, translate, vote on, and define. The movement had not reached the end of the argument. It had built a much more demanding beginning.
By Tyler Prochazka & Béatrice Serrurier
Linked sources and literature
Public sources are listed below. Oral-history quotations were submitted to BIEN’s 40th Anniversary Oral History Project and are reproduced with permission.
Between 1996 and 2006, a fringe academic network learned to reach activists, cross borders, and change the meaning of its own name.
In September 1998, Karl Widerquist arrived at the BIEN Congress in Amsterdam carrying the unease of an unpublished academic only a few years out of graduate school. Basic income sat so far outside mainstream politics that he had never heard of BIEN during its first decade, even though he already supported the idea. Now he had entered a congress hall filled, in his memory, with hundreds of people who cared about it. He went to thank Robert van der Veen, one of the congress organizers. Van der Veen replied that the proposal had assured him there would be at least one good presentation at the congress.
The remark stayed with Widerquist because the room itself offered recognition. “The feeling of being in a room with hundreds of other supporters was amazing,” he later wrote in BIEN’s anniversary oral history. The network’s first decade had solved the isolation problem for people who could make it into the room. Its second would turn on everyone else: who could find BIEN, who counted as part of it, and whether an organization still named for Europe could speak to a movement spreading beyond it.
Research graphic: the institutional milestones that widened BIEN’s reach, 1996–2006.
BIEN had opened a website in 1996, but that can mislead. This was no polished digital institution. The site began as a public shelf for material that had previously travelled by post. The printed newsletter still formed the network’s core, going to fee-paying members three times a year until July 2001. BIEN introduced life membership in 1998 partly to escape the awkward labor of repeatedly collecting small dues. In January 2000, email NewsFlashes began circulating developments to a readership that extended beyond formal members.
The handoff from paper to the web was therefore gradual. Envelopes, downloadable files, email lists, and face-to-face congresses worked alongside one another. What changed first was the cost of discovery. A supporter who missed a congress no longer had to know the right scholar, institution, or postal address before learning that the network existed.
After becoming newsletter editor in 2004, Yannick Vanderborght bought basicincome.org because bien.org was unavailable. He taught himself to manage the site with software he remembers as possibly Dreamweaver, uploading newsletter items and congress information as he learned. “The design was terrible, but the digital presence really helped to expand our reach,” he recalled. The site was valuable precisely because it did not require a communications department. A scholar with a domain name, collected material, and patience could keep the door open.
The web did not remove the physical work of maintaining an international organization. BIEN did not yet conduct online meetings, so Executive Committee members and congress organizers met in person whenever they could. Money was short. Vanderborght remembers distinguished colleagues sharing rooms in cheap hostels; when meetings took place in Brussels, some slept at Philippe Van Parijs’s home. At times, he said, they resembled “a small group of conspirators.” The global network was still held together by spare beds, long email threads, and people willing to travel without much institutional support.
A second door opened over breakfast in New York. In December 1999, five people met at the Kiev diner and founded the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network, or USBIG. They began with a mailing list of thirty names. By 2002, USBIG’s first congress drew over one hundred participants from eight countries, including academics, activists, and students. Its structure grew from the same low-cost tools that were changing BIEN: email, volunteer labor, seminars, and recurring meetings. But its tone was more openly oriented toward building a constituency around the idea.
Vanderborght remembers USBIG as a turning point inside BIEN. Its action-oriented style encouraged activists from other countries to enter a network that had been fairly academic, bringing together economists, philosophers, sociologists, lawyers, and political scientists. The change produced friendly tension. Some members wanted BIEN to remain a scholarly forum. Others saw research as one part of a wider organizing project. The argument was really about authority: who could speak for basic income, and what BIEN owed to people trying to move it into public life.
The congress route recorded that widening constituency. Amsterdam in 1998 was followed by Berlin in 2000, Geneva at the International Labour Office in 2002, and Barcelona in 2004. The volume that grew from Amsterdam carried the title Basic Income on the Agenda: Policy Objectives and Political Chances. The wording is revealing. Ethical arguments still mattered, but participants were also asking about objectives, institutions, coalitions, and the political chances of implementation.
That shift did not mean the proposal had become politically easy. It meant the network had begun to study the resistance it would meet. Trade unions worried that basic income could weaken their traditional representative role. Welfare specialists disputed costs, targeting, and reciprocity. Parties could endorse the language of income security while avoiding unconditionality. As BIEN reached new countries, it encountered different welfare systems and different reasons for saying no.
Brazil supplied both evidence of progress and a warning against easy celebration. On 8 January 2004, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed Law 10.835, authored by Senator Eduardo Suplicy, establishing a citizen’s basic income in law. The statute called for implementation in stages and gave initial priority to people in greatest need. At the Barcelona congress, economist Lena Lavinas and her co-authors described the result as an “exceptionality and paradox”: Brazil had recognized a universal right while its operating policy continued to favor means tests, conditions, and narrowly targeted transfers. The worldwide turn brought BIEN closer to actual government choices, where a principle could win formal approval and still stall in practice.
Period documents: the Barcelona congress confronted implementation, while a new journal carried the arguments forward.
In September 2004, BIEN held its tenth congress within Barcelona’s Universal Forum of Cultures, a months-long international program of conferences and public events. The setting was unusually appropriate. By then, one fifth of BIEN’s online subscribers and one quarter of its life members lived outside Europe, making the organization’s old name increasingly difficult to defend. On 20 September 2004, the General Assembly adopted the Executive Committee’s proposal to change the Basic Income European Network into the Basic Income Earth Network. Vanderborght later called the Barcelona transformation the most pivotal moment he had experienced in BIEN.
The new word was ambitious, perhaps even awkwardly so, but it answered a concrete institutional question. “European” had ceased to describe the people receiving the NewsFlashes, building affiliates, and bringing congress papers from other regions. The vote gave those networks a formal claim on BIEN’s identity. Guy Standing and Eduardo Suplicy served as co-chairs from 2004 to 2008, and the organization decided that future congresses should alternate between European and non-European locations.
The research infrastructure widened as well. By December 2006, Basic Income Studies was publishing its first volume as an international journal devoted to basic-income research. Stuart White’s article on the exploitation objection thanked the audience at the 2004 Barcelona congress for comments on an earlier version. That small acknowledgement shows the institutional chain: an argument presented in a congress room was tested by peers, revised, and circulated through a journal built for a field that was finally expected to endure.
The decade ended with the geographical consequence of the Barcelona vote. On 3–4 November 2006, Cape Town hosted BIEN’s first congress outside Europe. Widerquist remembers Bishop Zephania Kameeta pounding the podium and repeating “Words, Words, Words” before announcing that supporters had raised money for a basic-income pilot in Namibia. It was a demand to convert a worldwide conversation into action. The next decade would begin from that pressure.
Ten years earlier, BIEN’s website had been little beyond a digital shelf. By 2006, the network had changed its name, its audience, its research machinery, and the geography of its meetings. The bad website did not accomplish that alone. It opened one of the doors. The rest came from people who answered emails, shared rooms, built affiliates, argued over the network’s purpose, and finally voted to redraw what “we” meant.
BIEN's first decade gave a scattered idea a name, a mailing list, and a place to meet
In September 1986, about sixty people came to Louvain-la-Neuve carrying a private suspicion: the idea they cared about had no home. They had arrived from different disciplines and political traditions, with interests running through philosophy, economics, social policy, labor, feminism, welfare reform, and the politics of unemployment. BIEN's own history calls the meeting a moment when many "lonely fighters" suddenly found others like them.
The Belgian beginning was small enough to name. In autumn 1983, Paul-Marie Boulanger, Philippe Defeyt, and Philippe Van Parijs, then connected with demography, economics, and philosophy at the University of Louvain, formed a working group around an idea Van Parijs had circulated in December 1982 under the phrase allocation universelle. The group used the collective pseudonym Collectif Charles Fourier. Its main public work was an April 1985 special issue of La Revue nouvelle.
The break came through a prize. The Collectif entered an essay competition on the future of work organized by the King Baudouin Foundation and won. The prize money did something ordinary and decisive: it paid for a meeting. Invitations and time had to be covered before an idea could become a network. The essay prize turned a circle of researchers into hosts.
The guest list now reads like a genealogy of the field: Gunnar Adler-Karlsson, Jan-Otto Andersson, Yoland Bresson, Hermione Parker, Annie Miller, Claus Offe, Guy Standing, Robert van der Veen, Georg Vobruba, Tony Walter, and many others. They did not arrive with a single doctrine. They arrived with overlapping worries about work, poverty, bureaucracy, freedom, and the design of European welfare states after the postwar settlement began to crack.
The proposal that held the room together was simple enough to say and difficult enough to argue over for forty years. Anyone who has been to a BIEN Congress knows we are still arguing. BIEN now defines basic income as “a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement.” In the 1980s, that definition cut across the habits of social policy. Assistance usually meant proving need, proving household status, proving job search, or proving deservingness. Basic income moved the burden of proof away from the recipient.
The intellectual atmosphere was bolder than the later policy shorthand can suggest. Around the same time BIEN was being born, Robert van der Veen and Van Parijs advanced what they called a capitalist road to communism: a tax-financed unconditional basic income inside welfare capitalism, rising far enough to blur the line between paid work and free time. A 2024 revisit of that thesis connects it directly to automation and the post-labor world. The phrase still jars, which is part of its value. The early debate asked how much of life had been handed over to wages, and what might happen if survival loosened its grip on work.
The final session in Louvain-la-Neuve made the turn from conference to institution. Several participants wanted a permanent association that could publish a regular newsletter and organize regular conferences. Guy Standing proposed the name Basic Income European Network. The acronym mattered more than a committee might have expected: BIEN means good in French and Spanish. A serious organization began with a useful name and a small joke.
By 1988, the association had statutes. Its purpose was to connect individuals and groups interested in basic income and to foster informed discussion across Europe. Peter Ashby, Claus Offe, and Guy Standing became the first chairpersons. Walter Van Trier served as secretary, Alexander de Roo as treasurer, and Van Parijs edited the newsletter, later combining that role with the secretary position. The first decade depended on exactly this kind of administrative labor. Someone had to keep the addresses current. Someone had to collect papers, send notices, and make the next meeting happen.
The newsletter became the lifeline. BIEN's short history is blunt about the pre-internet reality: the printed newsletter formed the core of the network's existence. From 1988 to July 2001, it went to fee-paying members three times a year, thirty-six issues in all. In the first decade, the network traveled through envelopes. The movement had a pulse because paper kept arriving.
The congresses gave the pulse a calendar. Louvain-la-Neuve in 1986 led to Antwerp in 1988, Florence in 1990, Paris in 1992, London in 1994, and Vienna in 1996. The route is easy to flatten into a list of cities. It was more than that. Every stop carried papers, arguments, friendships, disagreements, and new people who could return home with proof that the conversation existed outside their own heads.
The anniversary responses add small human edges to the official chronology. In our interviews collected for the anniversary, Malcolm Torry remembered attending the Paris congress in 1992 and agreeing to help organize the London congress in 1994. Karl Widerquist remembered the same era from the outside: he was already a strong supporter of basic income and would have tried to attend BIEN events if he had known they existed, but in the pre-internet years he simply had not heard of them. That is the first decade in miniature: a network being built fast enough to matter, and slowly enough that people still missed it.
The public record also grew through books. BIEN's history lists proceedings from the first Louvain-la-Neuve conference, the Antwerp conference, Van Parijs's 1992 volume Arguing for Basic Income, and later collections that carried the debate into policy options, political feasibility, and income security as a right. The first decade was therefore an archive-making project as much as a meeting series. The papers did not disappear when the rooms emptied.
In 1996, BIEN opened a website, initially making its newsletters available to a wider public. Beginning in January 2000, the new BIEN NewsFlashes expanded the flow of online updates. That early digital presence mattered. For a network born by post, a public digital shelf changed the cost of discovery. Yannick Vanderborght later recalled buying the basicincome.org domain in the 2000s and learning to manage an early website; he remembered the design as terrible, but also said the digital presence helped expand BIEN's reach. The web did not create the network, but it made the network easier to find.
The first decade's achievement was quieter than legislation. BIEN gave the idea a name, a mailing list, a newsletter, a rhythm of congresses, a set of proceedings, and eventually a public address. By 1996, basic income supporters could point to something durable. They had a place to send papers, a place to meet, and a place to look for one another.
That made the later expansion possible when the network grew beyond Europe. The global turn did not come out of nowhere. It rested on the work of the first decade: the room, the mail, the congresses, the archive, and the stubborn habit of keeping the conversation alive.
BIEN Civic Forum will be held on the 22nd of August. On this day, having been called “India Day”, two major plenary discussions will be held: one that focuses on the Indian state of Telangana and its policy initiatives related to basic income, and a second one about the more general debate at the Indian national level.
As for the Thematic Areas for Plenary Sessions, these have been improved and detailed, as follows:
Ideological Perspectives and Diverse Worldviews on Basic Income
Exploring different ideological perspectives and worldviews that see an unconditional Basic Income as a desirable component of a more equitable and inclusive society
Women’s Care and Unpaid Work: Is Basic Income an essential component of a new paradigm of Equity?
What implications and impact would basic income have on the lives women who constitute more than half of the global population? Can we talk of a sustainable society as long as we steal labor from women? Can an unconditional basic income remedy this structural inequity?
Is Basic Income the Foundation of a Caring Economy and Society?
Is it possible to build an economy and a society that is based on values of caring, sharing and partnering rather than power, domination and control? Is an unconditional basic income an essential ingredient of such a society?
The Emancipatory Potential: What forms of Freedom and what kind of Community Life does Basic Income promote?
Basic Income experiments across the world have demonstrated repeatedly that an unconditional basic income has a strong emancipatory effect of its recipients. It loosens the constraints of existence and liberates the mind to seek a life and a community better than what we have now. What implications does this freedom and emancipation have on us and the communities that we dwell in?
Basic Income, the Commons and Sovereign Wealth Funds
Our society privileges and celebrates private inheritance, but it equally turns invisible what can be called our public inheritance, and the fact that it is people who own natural resources and the state is just a custodian. This perspective if implemented can radically transform the way we view, manage and account for our natural wealth and endowments.
BI Pilots: Opportunities and Limits of Evidence
In both the low-income countries and in high-income countries, there have been basic income pilot studies. While we already have the results of some of the studies, by mid-2019, we are likely to have more results. The Congress will deliberate both the results and also what they can achieve in terms of policy change
Basic Income and Political Action: What does it take to transform and idea into policy?
It is one thing to have strong evidence from pilot studies and something else to get the acceptance of the policy makers and persuade them to act on it. There have been some pioneers among politicians and policy-makers across continents who have taken the plunge and implemented different versions unconditional income transfers, inspired by the spirit of the idea of basic income. Do we see them as first steps towards a full UBI? Or as distortions of the idea?
Development Aid and Corporate Philanthropy: Is Basic Income a Better Paradigm and Way Forward?
In recent years, there has been a great deal of rethinking about the effectiveness of the current paradigms of giving aid either to countries or to communities. Unconditional Basic Income is increasingly emerging as a radical alternative to conventional notions of giving aid. We witness this shift as much within the UN think-tanks as that of corporate philanthropy.
As for thematic areas for concurrent sessions have been updated and completed:
Ideological Perspectives on Basic Income
Women’s Care and Unpaid Work: Is Basic Income the new paradigm of Equity?
Basic Income in Development Aid Debate: Is there a Paradigm-shift?
Religious Perspectives on Basic Income
Basic Income as a Foundation of a Caring Economy and Society?
What forms of Freedom and What kind of Community Life does Basic Income promote?
Basic Income and Blockchain Technology: Are there Synergies?
Basic Income, Poverty and Rural Livelihoods
Basic Income, the Commons, and Sovereign Wealth Funds: Is Public Inheritance an emerging issue?
Basic Income Pilots: Opportunities and Limits
Basic Income and Political Action: What does it take to transform an Idea into Policy?
Basic Income and Corporate Philanthropy: Is Basic Income a better paradigm and way forward?
Basic Income and Children
Basic Income and Mental Health
Basic Income and Intentional Communities: What does this Experience Teach us?
There will also be a Short Films Exhibition, organized in partnership with Grundeinkommen Television (Gtv), which a is part of the Initiative Grundeinkommen, a pioneering civil society initiative established in 2008. Guidelines for submission:
The length of the Film should be below 15 minutes;
Your film should be made in 2018 or 2019 and be shown for the first time to a wider audience at the Congress;
The film should be in English or with English subtitles;
Entries should reach latest by 1st June 2019;
A committee appointed by INBI will select the entries for exhibition at the Congress;
Two of these selected films will be jointly rewarded INBI Short Film Prize of 500 US Dollars each.
For further information and to submit films, please contact Enno Schmidt, Chair of the Committee. ennoschmidt@me.com.
General registrations can be made here. For paper abstract submission (in MS Word document between 300 and 500 words), please email to: 19biencongress.india@gmail.com.
