Between Universalism and Workfare: Notes on the General Income of Citizenship of Catalonia

Abstract

Towards the end of 2017, Catalonia began the process of implementing the General Citizenship Income (GCI) that emerged through a Popular Legislative Initiative. The article aims to understand the process of creation and implementation of the GCI based on four axes.: 1) the tensions of meaning between the ideology of “universalism unconditionally” crystallized in the Universal Income proposals and the “conditioned and targeted” rents; 2) its opportunity in the Spanish and Catalan socio-economic context; 3) orientation of meaning of the Promoter Group of the Initiative emphasizing the different views on the scope of the GCI (“Labor” versus “universalists”); 4) the contribution of the GCI regarding the previous policies and the initial problems in its implementation, which updated the debate on the “traps” of the targeted and conditioned policies. This article transcends the Catalan experience and offer clues to feed current discussions in the field of social policies