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.
Five words for a crowded decade
That argument came to a head at the 2016 BIEN Congress in Seoul.
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.
The General Assembly adopted a definition concise enough to travel: "a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement". BIEN made the five tests explicit: periodic, cash, individual, universal, and unconditional.
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.
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.
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 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 appeared in all six Democratic debates held in 2019. He missed the January 2020 debate, then returned for the February debate. Seven appearances turned Santens’s hoped-for breakthrough into a sustained national argument.
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.
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
Then the world shut down.
By January 2022, World Bank researchers had catalogued 3,856 social-protection and labor measures across 223 economies in response to COVID-19. During 2020 and 2021, cash transfers alone reached around 1.4 billion people, about one person in six worldwide. Governments mailed cheques, replaced wages, expanded child benefits, suspended utility cutoffs, subsidized employers, and built emergency payment systems at a speed that had previously sounded impossible.
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.
After the emergency peak, the payment fell to 200 mumbucas in 2022 and rose to 230 in late 2023 as enrollment passed 91,000. A 2026 municipal recertification notice reported more than 70,000 current beneficiaries, a reminder that program counts change with eligibility reviews and administrative updates.
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.
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."
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 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.
The government describes ENRA as the world’s first nationwide, long-term universal basic income. That formulation deserves care rather than repetition as a slogan. Other governments have operated broad cash programs that scholars classify as basic income or close relatives. ENRA’s distinctive feature is the combination: a sovereign government explicitly designed a quarterly, individual, unconditional payment for eligible Marshallese citizens under a residence-based eligibility system and committed to continue it for two decades.
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.
- BIEN’s basic-income definition
- BIEN 2016 General Assembly report
- BIEN 40th-anniversary oral-history project
- UK Charity Commission record for BIEN
- Finland basic-income experiment results
- The Guardian on Finland’s experiment
- Cambridge study of the Ontario pilot
- Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration
- GiveDirectly basic-income study
- OpenResearch unconditional-cash study
- World Bank COVID-19 social-protection measures
- Marica basic-income research
- Marshall Islands ENRA white paper
- Marshall Islands ENRA first disbursement
- World Bank Marshall Islands energy-crisis update
- BIEN regional Hubs
- BIEN 25th Congress in Toronto
