The RSA is pleased to announce the publication of the 14th Policy Impact book: Cash in hand: basic income as regional policy, by Marc Doussard, Jurgen De Wispelaere and Joe Chrisp.
For decades, policymakers have thrown grants, tax breaks and infrastructure spending at struggling regions, only to watch populations shrink and opportunity drain away. The new RSA Policy Impact book, Cash in Hand, argues that a much simpler tool, simply giving people money, no questions asked, deserves a central place in the regional development toolkit. The authors’ starting point is that left-behind places are not just poor but also precarious. Residents cycle in and out of unstable jobs, housing and benefits eligibility, and the welfare systems meant to catch them are ill-suited to the task: payments arrive too slowly, small changes in circumstance can trigger a total loss of support, and people are left constantly reapplying rather than building stability. The result, the authors say, is a cycle of “firefighting” policy that reacts to crises instead of addressing the root cause.
Basic income, regular, unconditional cash paid directly to individuals, has surged in popularity since the 2008 financial crash and again during the pandemic, fuelled by a wave of pilot schemes from Namibia to Finland to California. Trials reviewed in the book consistently show improvements in health, wellbeing, homelessness and education, with only modest effects on how much people work. This finding is likely to reassure sceptics who fear cash handouts discourage employment. Crucially, the authors don’t pitch basic income as a cure-all; instead, they frame it as a kind of insurance policy underpinning everything else a region tries, freeing people to retrain, relocate for work, start businesses or simply weather a crisis without falling through the cracks.
There is a catch, however: almost everything researchers know about basic income comes from studying individuals, not communities. Nobody has good data on what happens when a whole town or region is flooded with unconditional cash simultaneously. Do local economies transform, or do the effects just cancel out? The book calls for large-scale “saturation” trials designed specifically to answer that question, especially in wealthier countries where such experiments have been rare.
The idea isn’t just theoretical, and the authors highlight real programmes taking root at the city and regional level, from the Marshall Islands to the Brazilian cities of Maricá and Niterói, often driven by competition between mayors and regions eager to attract residents and investment. But turning a successful pilot into permanent law, the authors caution, is a much harder political lift than running the trial itself, and the shape basic income takes will vary enormously depending on local politics and existing welfare structures. The book’s message to policymakers is to stop treating basic income as a fringe idea for national welfare reform and start treating it as a serious regional development strategy; one that addresses precarity directly, even if the full community-wide payoff is still, for now, more promise than proof.
Current Call for Applications
Please see the 2026 RSA Policy Expo grant funding scheme page for more information. The Policy Expo initiative is worth up to £16,500 to successful teams aiming to connect their work and wider communities to societal questions and policy needs. The deadline for this year’s applications is 24th November 2026.
The research should produce an article for our gold open access journal, Regional Studies, Regional Science and a short ‘policy facing’ book of no more than 30,000 words. The book will have a large distribution, as it will be sent in print copy to all RSA members and in e-book format to all those who subscribe to any of the journals of the RSA.