The UBI Piloters Network brings together researchers, policymakers, activists, and civil society actors interested or engaged in trialling Unconditional Basic Income (UBI). The space is convened by the University of Bath, the University of Freiburg’s Institute for Basic Income Studies, and the Basic Income Earth Network. We aim to create connection across the UBI piloting field, to build new collaborations, share key learnings, and establish best practice. Sign up to our newsletter here and read on to learn more.
Research, policy, and activist interest in UBI has exploded in recent years, and this has led to a huge rise in the number of global UBI pilots. Yet for all this amazing growth, until now, no global platform has existed for sharing UBI pilot findings, creating community across the piloting field, or supporting researchers to engage effectively with policymaker audiences. The UBI Piloters Network aims to remedy these issues by building and curating the world’s first global network of UBI piloters, taking inspiration from the work of the Basic Income Earth Network and US UBI Community of Practice.
Launched in Summer 2023, The UBI Piloters Network curates a monthly newsletter that brings together updates from across the piloting community, featuring updates on recent research, policy developments, potential gatherings, publications, and opportunities for collaboration.
The Network also hosts an online seminar series for piloters to share recent findings and discuss emerging developments. It will host a hybrid Winter School on ‘How To Build A Pilot’, and convene the world’s first ever conference of UBI piloters – hosted in Germany in Summer 2024.
If you have ideas for how to expand this work and make it more relevant to you and the UBI piloting community, please do get in touch! We want this to work for the community it aims to serve.
Please also share the Network with piloters far and wide!
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Our Partners
The UBI Piloters Network is a collaboration between the University of Bath (in particular the UBI piloting WorkFREE research team), the Freiburg Institute of Basic Income Studies (FRIBIS – especially the UBI Experiments Team), and the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN). Seed funding has come from Bath, FRIBIS, and the European Research Council.
The University of Bath is a leading centre of UBI research in the UK and is in the process of building a UK UBI Beacon to nurture the next generation of UBI scholars, activists, and engaged policymakers. At Bath, WorkFREE brings together scholars, activists and civil society institutions from India and the UK to pilot ‘UBI+’ in four informal settlements in inner-city Hyderabad, India. UBI+ combines universal basic income (UBI) and needs-focused, participatory community organising in order to support people to increase their power to meet their needs. The two-year pilot seeks to answer a wide range of questions, including ‘What impact does UBI+ have on people’s freedom from exploitation?’ and ‘Can UBI+ support the green transition?’.
FRIBIS is an interdisciplinary network at the University of Freiburg dedicated to research on Universal Basic Income. By bringing together researchers and civil society actors from all over the world, we aim to provide a sound, well-researched foundation for the public and political discourse on Basic Income. In this way, it wants to contribute to transformation towards a more just and sustainable society.
BIEN is a global network of UBI activists and researchers. Drawing on its unique Basic Income expertise built over decades of work, BIEN strives to be a globally trusted, go-to source of information and analysis around Basic Income. BIEN builds connective tissue between people and institutions working on Basic Income, be these activists, campaigners, researchers, governments or civil society organisations. And BIEN aims to catalyse local and global debate and work to push the boundaries of what is possible, all in the direction of a more just, caring society.
The ERC is a major Europe Union research funding agency at the heart of research and innovation across the continent.
Share Your Stories and Contact Us
If you have UBI Piloting New to share, other relevant material to go out in the Newsletter, ideas you want to run buy us, or plans to pitch, please get in touch with us here: piloters@basicincome.org
To access the proposal and press coverage, click here.
“At a glance:
This report outlines a proposal for a basic income micro-pilot. This proposal is the result of two years of community consultation in Central Jarrow and the Grange area of East Finchley.
Grange Big Local in East Finchley and Big Local Central Jarrow have led two years of community consultation to design a basic income pilot in their areas.
Community consultation, supported by Basic Income Conversation and Northumbria University, found substantial support for basic income pilots. A combination of door-knocking, workshops, roundtables and surveys found that the majority of respondents felt both that it was a good idea in principle and that it would be good to run pilots in their local areas.
The pilot would also recruit a control group. This group would not receive basic income payments but would do questionnaires, focus groups and interviews as part of the pilot evaluation to understand the difference in experience between people receiving a basic income and people not. The people in this group would be paid for their time.
Validated evaluation measures for the pilot would be drawn from the Northumbria University team’s existing protocol resource. This process would involve co-production with communities. We therefore do not propose a specific research protocol for evaluation of impacts of the basic income pilots at this stage, but the existing protocol resource provides clear indications of robust methods. A mix of quantitative and qualitative research methods that have been validated and received ethical approval at universities is recommended.
All outputs should be produced in consultation with community members, with reports designed to be as accessible as possible. It may be advisable to include design costs for easy-read versions of reports. Coauthorship should be offered to community members providing substantive input. All formal community involvement should be remunerated at Northumbria University research assistance rates (currently £17.19 per hour though in equivalent vouchers where appropriate for DWP purposes) or on the basis of in-kind support.”
In Maricá, Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil, the creation of a local currency in combination with a Basic Income as a Solidarity Economy is creating community wealth.
A webinar will be take place on Friday, 30 June, at 6pm BST organized by the Jain Family Institute (JFI) in the USA about the Basic Income trial in Maricá in Brazil.
Join JFI for a presentation and discussion on the mumbuca, a digital complementary currency introduced in Maricá, Brazil, as part of the city’s Solidarity Economy Program, as well as an interactive visualization of the mumbuca economy: We Take Mumbucas: Charting the Complementary Currency that’s Transforming a Brazilian City
You can register for the webinar by clicking here.
You can read the report about the use of the local currency Mumbuca, in Portuguese, by clicking here.
About 25% of the poorer section of the local population of 200,000 inhabitants receive a Basic Income in this local currency.
The Wales Centre for Public Policy (WCPP) were commissioned by Welsh Government officials, to hold a conference for academics working in the fields of basic income and children’s social care. The conference was held virtually on December 15th 2022 and was well attended by 70 academics.
WCPP has made available a highlights pack (see links at the end of this article) during the week commencing Monday 19th June 2023. The highlights pack includes
An overview of the event
Links to videos of keynote speakers, including video messages from
the Minister for Social Justice and Chief Whip and the Deputy Minister for Social Services
An outline of the contributions from speakers including a video recording
A summary of the questions to speakers
Discussion
Resources and biographies
Purpose of event:
The purpose of the event was to enable the Welsh Government to draw upon the best available research evidence about the implementation and impact of basic income schemes and wider support for care leavers. The event aimed to provide opportunities for discussion of;
The Basic Income for Care Leavers in Wales pilot and the evaluation that the Welsh Government has commissioned;
Key lessons from other research on basic income schemes;
Ways to support or strengthen the Welsh Government evaluation; and
Additional policies that could complement the Basic Income Pilot Scheme and increase its impact.
Speakers:
Chaired by Professor Steve Martin (WCPP), the conference included contributions from
Sir Professor Michael Marmot
Professor Sally Holland, David Westlake (CASCADE),
Professor Guy Standing,
Dr Miriam Laker – Oketta (Give Directly),
Hannah Webster (Royal Society of Arts),
Dr Eleanor Ott (Centre for Evidence and Implementation).
Discussion:
The conference was positively received by the academic community and provided Welsh Government Officials with insight from academics on the approach to evaluating the pilot. On the whole the audience were very positive both towards the pilot and the research and evaluation programme supporting it. It provided a strong endorsement of the approach which the Welsh Government is taking.
Key messages included the need for greater qualitative data and the benefit of creative and participatory methods. This was planned and has since been addressed by adding a new in-depth qualitative research using ethnographic methods module to the evaluation contract.
Other key points included the need for meaningful and ethical participation, this has been at the forefront of the evaluation since its inception. Furthermore, delegates pointed to the importance of building a legacy for the evaluation and using information that is already available to researchers. Useful pointers and personal connections were achieved and Welsh Government Officials are working with the evaluators (CASCADE) to provide a longer term research framework.
For an article on Five Key Takeaways from the conference, click here.
To download a Powerpoint presentation complete with live links to multiple resources including videos of speaker presentations, click here.
To view a pdf of the Powerpoint presentation without live links, click here.
Jamesta Istimewa is a Basic Income Pilot experiment that provides participants free cash payments without strings attached. “Jamesta” means Universal Basic Income Guarantee in Bahasa (Indonesian language), and “Istimewa” means “special,” which is nothing but another name for the Special Region of Yogyakarta. In this place, this experiment was conducted. Jamesta Istimewa also has the privilege of being the first Crowdfunding-Based Basic Income Pilot experiment in Yogyakarta and Indonesia, which was carried out in a structured and systematic manner.
Yogyakarta’s Basic Income Pilot (YBIP) was conducted to answer some basic questions: Do people tend to be lazy when receiving free money? Is that true, or is it just a myth? Can Basic Income – to a certain extent – positively affect a person’s mental health? How do Basic Income recipients interpret and respond to Basic Income payments for themselves and their future? As well as various other interesting questions that have been coloring the debates related to the pros and cons of UBI, especially in the Indonesian context.
This Basic Income Pilot ran from November 2021 to April 2022. Experimental participants were recruited through an online open form distributed to the public in Yogyakarta. This city was chosen because it has a unique and interesting sociodemographic characteristic. Yogyakarta is widely known as a college-student-friendly city. With hundreds of universities, students come here from all over Indonesia. Yogyakarta is also known as a city of arts and culture with various relics of the past, which attracts millions of tourists from all over the world every year. Yogyakarta is also known as an area with a relatively low minimum wage level compared to other provinces in Indonesia. Furthermore, the cost of living in Yogyakarta is also touted as one of the cheapest in the country. Of course, the attributions above are debatable. But Yogyakarta’s unique sociocultural and socioeconomic setting was considered appropriate and exciting for carrying out this first Basic Income experiment in Indonesia.
Anyone living within the province of Yogyakarta during the experimental period (November 2021-April 2022) could register as a participant. Yogyakarta consists of four regencies (Sleman, Bantul, Kulon Progo, and Gunung Kidul) and one city (Yogyakarta City). According to the results of the 2020 Population Census (BPS, September 2020), the total population of DIY was 3,668,719 people. Participants who lived in Yogyakarta did not have to have a Yogyakarta ID card. Those who had a Yogyakarta ID card but lived outside Yogyakarta at the time of the experiment could not register as participants. When registration opened online on October 15, 2021, there were 2150 initial registrants. It was found that 50 double registrants had to be removed. Thus, the total number of registrants for this experiment was 2,100 people spread across five DIY regions. The average age of applicants was 33 years, with a composition of 51.4 percent male and 48.1 percent female. Of a hundred Pilot participants, 60 percent of them are female.
From the 2,100 registrants, 100 participants were randomly selected to be involved in further experiments: 25 recipients of basic income (control group) and 75 people who did not receive basic income but were willing to be involved and fill out the questionnaire given by the researcher (control group). The drawing process was carried out via Livestream on YouTube, and the recording can be seen here.
Jamesta Istimewa was run by a group of enthusiastic volunteer-young people in Yogyakarta. Most of them live in Yogyakarta, and some work remotely from outside the city, for example in Bandung and Jakarta. This experiment ran because of the full support of the CEOs of Kita Bisa (M. Al Fatih Timur) and M. Faiz Ghifari (Strategic Initiatives Kitabisa.com). Sena M. Luphdika was the project coordinator responsible for the overall management and implementation of this Pilot. Sena was supported by several other volunteers, such as Bimo Ario Suryandaru (Campaign Coordinator), Dianti Wulansari, Kurniawan Adhi, and Niko Febrianur (Webmaster). They are the ones who were behind the scenes running this Pilot from beginning to end. Yanu Endar Prasetyo (IndoBIG Network & Research Center for Population BRIN) is the research coordinator responsible for the study of this Pilot.
The final report of this pilot experiment will be released on Sunday, May 7, 2023 in a public discussion in Yogyakarta with some panelists such as Sarath Davala (Chair, BIEN), Dr. Nawawi (Chair, Research Center for Population – BRIN), Herni Ramdlaningrum (The Prakarsa) and representatives from the Yogyakarta Province Poverty Reduction Acceleration Team. The discussion also can be followed on YouTube Live Stream by clicking here.
