The 2026 Congress is being held as the early decades of the twenty-first century are defined by a polycrisis: the causal entanglement of multiple, overlapping crises. These pressures span interconnected systems, including the natural environment (climate disruption), the economy (inflation, unaffordability, widening income and wealth inequality, and persistent poverty), political institutions (erosion of public trust, democratic strain, and the rise of exclusionary populism and authoritarian governments), and the rights-based international order. Together, they expose the limits of fragmented welfare systems that respond to risks in isolation rather than as cumulative and systemic challenges. In this context, basic income is gaining renewed attention not only as an anti-poverty measure, but as a foundational policy for strengthening social inclusion and solidarity.

This Congress theme positions basic income as a unifying response to the polycrisis—one that cuts across policy silos and reconnects income security to broader questions of justice, sustainability, and democratic capacity. The theme invites critical examination of basic income as part of a renewed social contract capable of countering precarity, fragmentation, and exclusion in complex, interdependent systems.