An exciting and lively talk by Miriam Laker-Oketta, research director of GiveDirectly, the world’s largest basic income project, on the role basic income plays in fighting climate change and preserving biodiversity.

From her rich experiential knowledge, Miriam Laker-Oketta provides real-life, real-world insight into what difference a basic income actually makes to people and their behavior, and how that affects climate change mitigation and biodiversity. GiveDirectly is now active in 11 countries. Miriam Laker-Oketta limits herself to Uganda, with cross-references to Kenya, Rwanda, and Congo.

Both papers are available online:

In May 2022, Bernhard Neumärker gave two lectures addressing the potential of basic income in the climate crisis. His May 19 lecture was at the invitation of Students for Future Freiburg and was entitled “Climate Justice and New Ordoliberalism: The Case for Social Sustainability and Basic Income”. In his lecture, Prof. Neumärker shows how climate bonus systems can be designed as a partial basic climate income. He also demonstrates the extent to which net offset systems between CO₂ tax and basic climate income are ecologically and socially disadvantageous in terms of ecological visibility and incentivization when compared to a gross system with separate tax and transfer design. T, based on a German paper on Carbon Pricing and Social Inequality in Germany, he demonstrated that by having a per capita equal repayment of the CO₂ tax, one not only promotes fair redistribution and inequality reduction, but also achieves a higher socio-environmental target efficiency than with the usual means-tested social transfers. Watch this talk on our YouTube-Kanal.

On May 26, Prof. Neumärker gave a keynote speech at the 40th International Energy Workshop at the Konzerthaus in Freiburg. In his lecture “Decarbonization regulation by a tax-transfer system: The Carbon Tax – Climate Basic Income (CaTaBi) Scheme”, he presented his gross tax-transfer system “CaTaBi”, focusing on his governance approach of the so called “New Ordoliberalism”. Among other things, he showed to what extent only CaTaBi is politically strategy proof, while other uses of tax revenues always lead to the expectation of strategic manipulation of politics by interest groups (rent-seeking). In the ecosocial context of the climate crisis, one has to resort to ex post governance, which offers sufficient protection against unforeseen contingencies of climate development. Bernhard Neumärker, on the other hand, does not believe that tackling the climate crisis with statistical forecasts or scenarios ex ante is expedient. Instead, he argued for viewing the “environment” in terms of conflict economics and game theory as an adversary of “nature,” which would in fact react unfavorably to humans due to man-made climate and environmental damage.

In light of recent developments, Bernhard Neumärker drew a parallel between the climate crisis and the Ukraine war. Both crises would likewise reveal that “climate protection” and “national defense” as (global) public goods would only be taken seriously and sufficient investments would only be made if “protection” or “defense” were no longer only discussed in the abstract, but protection against an adversary/aggressor (be it “nature” or the Putin regime) was actively sought. The fact that Germany was only prepared to spend 100 billion euros on its military defense in a state of immediate threat clearly illustrated the underlying precautionary principle.

In his new paper: “Is a Penny a Month a Basic Income? A Historiography of the Concept of a Threshold in Basic Income“, Prof. Toru Yamamori examines the definition of Universal Basic Income under the question of a threshold. Based on its basic pillars: unconditionality, individuality, and universality, he discusses the advantages and disadvantages of a threshold and gives a historical overview of the history and different currents of the demand and definition of a Universal Basic Income. With this paper, he is the winner of the 2021 BIS essay contest in the Journal “Basic Income Studies”.

Without the (re)definition, do we run the risk of calling even one cent a Universal Basic Income when it is paid unconditionally and universally to every individual? What are the reasons and arguments for successively removing this threshold from the definitions? Toru Yamamori discusses why and whether we should reintroduce a threshold into the definition of a Universal Basic Income in this paper, which was awarded the prize for the best paper of 2021 by the journal Basic Income Studies published by De Gruyter Verlag.
The question of the definition of Universal Basic Income is a central theme of the FRIBIS UBI & Gender team, which explores the pillars of definition: universality, unconditionality and individuality from an intersectional feminist perspective. With his historical analysis of the meaning of a threshold, Toru Yamamori has created a starting point for further reflections on the definition of what we call Universal Basic Income from different situations, perspectives and locations, and what this Basic Income means for each of us.

Find the Paper here: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/bis-2021-0037/html

Jessica Schulz is the team coordinator of the Gender & UBI Team and interviewed Toru with respect to his paper.

How did you come to deal with this question of a threshold in particular?

To what extent is the question of a threshold value related to feminist questions about the unconditional basic income?

Prof. Dr. Toru Yamamori is a Professor of Economics at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan and Senior Academic Research Editor of BIEN (Basic Income Earth Network). His research includes the philosophical foundations of feminist economics and the oral history of the working class women’s liberation movement that called for unconditional basic income in Britain in the 1970s.