Public lecture: Basic Income Experiments as a Policy Tool – Where Are We? Where to Go Next?

The past couple of years have been described as the age of basic income experiments. But the idea is and remains highly controversial, with basic income advocates increasingly frustrated about design and implementation of basic income experiments and especially the lack of policy development afterwards. Many advocates have now turned experiment critics, insisting we need basic income policy not more experimentation.

In this lecture Jurgen De Wispelaere will counter this view by insisting that policy experimentation is a critical part of policy development and basic income experiments remain a core feature of the policy process that may eventually lead to full basic income policy implementation.

The lecture uses insights from completed (Finland), ongoing (Netherlands), planned (Scotland) but also cancelled (Ontario, Canada) experiments to better understand the  role of basic income experimentation as a policy tool.

About the Speaker

Jurgen De Wispelaere is a Policy Fellow with the Institute for Policy Research, University of Bath, and a Guest Professor at Tampere University. A former occupational therapist and philosopher turned policy scholar, his main research focus is the political analysis of basic income. He has published extensively on basic income in leading international journals as well as specialist edited volumes. He is a coeditor of Basic Income: An Anthology of Contemporary Research (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and coediting The Routledge Handbook on Basic Income (Routledge, forthcoming). He is also completing a book on Basic Income Experiments: Theory, Practice, and Politics with Evelyn Forget (Policy Press, forthcoming). He has been a consultant to several government departments and nongovernment organizations on basic income and basic income experiments, including most recently the Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice at the World Bank.