Basic Income Grants and their normative Groundwork. Contexts – Schemes – Debates

Debates revolving around unconditional basic income grants (UBIG) have recently gained new momentum. On the backdrop of a digital dynamization of labour society and the CoVid 19 crisis, civil initiatives have brought basic income concepts to renewed attention also in German-speaking countries of the global north. In the global south, on the other hand, UBIG play an important role in debates regarding poverty relief. However, as of yet, there is no permanent implementation on a larger scale, pioneering projects have been exploratory only; existing concepts differ considerably regarding their normative and social political parameters and existing scholarly networks waver beween scientific reflection and activism. This complex situation may have been one of the reasons why an academic scrutiny of the normative groundwork of BIG models in their respective societal context is still missing in spite of its desirability. This is also true for Christian social ethics, especially in its protestant version, where the reformation's concept of calling supported a strict work ethos and BIG are especially disputed. It is exactly the academic
scrutiny of the normative groundwork of BIG models and discourses that the proposed project aims at with a twofold research question. 1. What are the explicit and implicit normative reasons and justifications of UBIG in regard to social political context and design? 2. Which typologies may be developed to structure UBIG debates along the
lines of historical and contextual situations in order to systematize and compare the respective basic normative assumptions underlying them? Research objects are UBIG designs ('models') and discourses in regard to their normative groundwork. The project aims at typologies and categorization, also historically, by including perspectives from anthropology, theory of justice, sustainability and intersectional gender theory. Alongside published UBIG designs and the scientific debate surrounding them, important sources are online discourses in social media that serve as prominent public discussion platforms regarding this issue. A comparative perspective geared to test plausibilities in different contexts is provided by the cooperation with partners from the global south. With Namibia and South Africa, an exemplary scrutiny focuses countries with an extensive contemporary debate on UBIG. As a result, the project aims for a systematic overview of the normative groundworks of designs and typologies of UBIG, and the scholarly and public discourses in the field. Additionally, the project seeks to develop a context sensitive normative criteriology as a Protestant contribution to the decisionmaking processes in civil society and politics.