Basic Income for the Arts in Ireland – What have we learned after 38 months?
When? Wednesday, December 3, 2025, 6:30-8:00 PM UK GMT
Where? Online (Zoom)
UBI Lab Arts, UBI Lab Leeds, UBI Lab Network and Basic Income Ireland present:
Please join us for the seventh in our special series of discussions dedicated to reflecting on what we can learn from the Irish Basic Income for the Arts Pilot Scheme.
For details and registration, click here.
BIEN Asia-Pacific at the Asia-Pacific Social Forum 2025 Conference in Bangkok, Thailand
As part of the Asia-Pacific Social Forum 2025: Another World is Possible, a special programme titled “Towards Dignity, Freedom, and Justice: Building a Future of Care through Universal Basic Income” will be held on November 2, 2025 (Day 2) from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at the College of Interdisciplinary Studies (CIS), Room 301, Thammasat University, Bangkok, Thailand.
Jointly organized by the Justice Peace and Integrity Commission (JPIC), the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), the Montfort Social Institute (MSI), the India Network for Basic Income, and WorkFREE, this programme will explore the transformative role of Universal Basic Income (UBI) in shaping a more just and caring future.
Bro. Varghese Theckanath (MSI & JPIC) will discuss UBI in reality, focusing on its effects on marginalized communities and its power to restore human dignity and social justice. John Michael (BIEN Asia-Pacific) will reflect on the broader Basic Income movement across the Asia-Pacific and Global South, examining how UBI challenges entrenched colonial, patriarchal, racial, casteist, and ableist structures.
The session will also feature a screening and discussion of the film Unconditional (30 minutes, English subtitles), which portrays real-world Basic Income experiments in India and Bangladesh — stories that redefined the meaning of justice, care, and social transformation.
Together, the programme invites participants to imagine and build futures where dignity, freedom, and justice are not privileges, but the foundations of society.
For more details and registration, click here.
Claus Offe
In memoriam
On October 1, 2025, one of the co-founders of BIEN, Claus Offe died in Berlin, the city in which he was born on March 16,1940. He was one of Germany’s most distinguished sociologists, associated with the Frankfurt School of thought. He long identified himself as ‘Green Left’ – being a founding member of the German Greens – and as such saw basic income very much as a transformational policy. He was our friend and colleague for forty years and will be sorely missed.
Claus studied sociology and political science in Köln and at Berlin’s Freie Universität, was an assistant of Jürgen Habermas at the University of Frankfurt, where he obtained his doctorate in political science. Habermas remained influential in his research and publications, along with Albert Hirschman, whom he also greatly admired.
He subsequently worked at the Universities of Konstanz, Bielefeld and Bremen, before returning to Berlin after the fall of the wall in 1989, first at Humboldt University and then at the Hertie School of Government, of which he was a co-founder. Along the way, he had several periods in the United States, at Berkeley, Stanford, Princeton, Harvard and the New School in New York, as well as in the ANU in Australia.
November 1985, Claus Offe, then still at Bielefeld, was invited to participate in the “first international conference on basic income”, held in Louvain-la-Neuve in September 1986. He replied straight away: “I find the whole idea of your conference very promising and attractive, and I gladly accept your invitation. As you may know, I am presently involved in the work of the group that tries to develop concrete legislative proposals on basic income for the green group within the Bundestag… Let me just say that you are really providing a public service in taking the initiative of this conference.”
The conference turned out to be the meeting at which BIEN was founded. Together with Peter Ashby, Claus Offe agreed to serve as BIEN’s first co-chair, a position he held until September 1988, when the duo was replaced by Edwin Morley-Fletcher and Guy Standing. Claus Offe remained an enthusiastic member of BIEN and regular participant in its congresses in the decades to follow. In particular, he rejoined the executive committee in 1998 as the efficient organizer of BIEN’s 2000 congress, hosted by the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung.
During his long career, Claus played an active role in the international scientific community and in Germany’s and the EU’s public debate. His superbly argued Europe Entrapped (2015), for example, was an exceptionally lucid and influential contribution to the discussion of the European monetary union, the conclusion of which was captured in one sentence: “The euro was a big mistake, the undoing of which would be an even bigger mistake.”
Among his other influential books was Disorganized Capitalism, a set of essays published in English in 1985 probing the links between social power and political authority, in which he first advocated a basic income as a response to modern unemployment. For a while, he was drawn to Tony Atkinson’s idea of a Participation Income, but came to see the limitation of that variant of basic income.
In recent years, Claus’s lung cancer increasingly limited his mobility, but not the sharpness of his mind and the warmth of his friendship. He was an enthusiastic fisherman, loving to prowl on the banks in search of ‘the big one’. Above all, he was one of those formidable intellectual personalities who helped give the worldwide basic income movement its strength and influence.
Philippe Van Parijs and Guy Standing
Library on UBI updated
To access the library, click here.
Submission to the report “Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth” to the Office of the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights
With endorsement from 70 of its affiliates and partner organizations from over 30 countries, BIEN has submitted the following inputs to the office of the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights seeking inputs for the Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth. In our submission, we propose policy actions for development contexts that we trust can help operationalize the promises of transformational Basic Income schemes.
BIEN highly values previous reports from the Office of the Special Rapporteur, which consistently highlight the relevance of Basic Income for this Office’s mandate. We hope this submission provides insightful material to the Special Rapporteur’s report to the UN Human Rights Council and that this will be the start of a dialogue and collaboration towards our shared goal of more just societies.
To read the submission, click here.