In 2017, both Barcelona, Utrecht/Nijmegen/Wageningen and Ontario implemented an unconditional policy with some links to the idea of Universal Basic Income (Van Parijs and Vanderborght, 2017). It is not an UBI policy (as a libertarian resource), rather a social policy (to fight poverty and social exclusion) like minimum income schemes, but unconditional in activation towards the labour market. The aim of this research is to show the factors that led to the emergence of this innovative unconditional minimum income policy and how these factors explain the variation of intensity in these three cases. The Netherlands, Spain and Canada do not have the same redistribution of competences at the local level. In the Netherlands, their municipalities have more leeway to define new social assistance policies - duration in time and variation of intensity - but subject to approval by the central government. The Barcelona municipality has little room for manoeuvre in defining new social assistance policies. They can only define social benefits of an urgent, basic, and specific nature. Why did Barcelona, despite having no enabling competences, go further than Utrecht in varying the intensity of the policy? Institutional conditions alone prove to be a limited source in explaining the outcome. It is therefore necessary to analyse other explanatory factors, such as policy actors - the role of political entrepreneurs and epistemic communities - and their relationship with institutional conditions. The argument we present focuses on two factors, the role of actors and institutions linked to the policy and the negotiation with higher-level governance units. We aim to explore the interaction between agency (actors) and structure (institutions). Through a process-tracing process based on analysis of institutional documents and press documents and semi-structured interviews with key actors we will present a crosscase comparison between the three municipalities/regions.

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experimental policies of basic income,local policies,comparative welfare policies,causal process-tracing (CPT),actors and institutions,comparative-historical analysis