Basic Income with Digital Community Currency: Digital Platforms for Public Policies Implementation During Pandemic Crisis
Autor(es)
This short paper presents a research-in-progress that discusses how basic income policies can be implemented using digital currency platforms and the implications of this approach in the context of the pandemic. We analyze the case of Banco Mumbuca, a non-profit organization that uses a community currency on a digital payment platform, E-Dinheiro, to deliver the basic income program of the Brazilian town of Maricá. This city program became one of the largest in the world during the COVID-19 pandemic, considering both the amount of money transferred to municipal beneficiaries and the adoption rate of a community currency by citizens and the local commerce. We adopt the Design Science Research (DSR) approach to analyze the case, considering this implementation as two entangled sub-artifacts: the public policy and the digital community currency. These sub-artifacts will be analyzed from the perspective of the problems they intend to solve, the particular aspects of the designed solution, the evaluation of the solution by actors involved, and the discussion of the achieved outcomes. This study intends to contribute to the basic income discussion that emerged as a solution for economic recovery from the COVID-19, the strategies for scaling up community currencies, and the DSR as a strategy for producing impactful research in the ICT4D field.