I am gratified that Borges’s review deems the book important, and notes its major contribution of outlining the social psychology insights required for analysts and policymakers to fashion viable poverty-alleviation programs. I am happy to know that he finds it commendable in synthesizing why conflict-sensitive poverty-alleviation efforts are important but difficult to enact, but can also have hopeful prospects if the psychological insights can be employed. It would have been useful if Borges’s review had mentioned not only the book’s treatment of how these and other theoretical insights (e.g., the policy sciences framework) are necessary to create and enact the programs, but also the book’s analysis of the difficulties of maintaining the viability of the programs, especially in terms of leakage, stigma, polarization, and increasing conflict.

It is unclear whether the review is criticizing the research design (eight countries and five types of programs) for not drawing overarching conclusions, or whether—as I would assert given my epistemological policy sciences commitment to respecting contextuality—the review is recognizing that “overarching conclusions” would go beyond the appropriate insights that I believe go as far as they should without over-generalizing. As the review correctly states: “Local knowledge is key as what works in one context may backfire in another.”

Yet in expressing regret that the book has “little integration or crosspollination between [sic] these cases” and its other calls for more summing up, Borges poses the challenge to find more in common among the five types of programs and across the psychological mechanisms. I believe this reflects a positivist bias in implying that greater generalization is possible. He notes that the complexity “makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to draw overarching conclusions.” That is exactly right. Thus, the book’s conclusion carefully avoids any support for the temptation to endorse “one size fits all” designs with respect to any of the types of poverty-alleviation programs. Borges’s own book correctly recognizes that assessing the political viability of different designs of conditional cash transfers needs to account for the different attributions of deservingness across Latin American countries. The purpose of the conclusion of my book is to summarize essential aspects drawn from attribution theory, other contributions of social psychology, and the policy sciences framework that analysts and policymakers ought to employ. It is not to find generalizable program designs, which would be both a futile effort and would undermine the practical effectiveness of such programs given the disparate contexts in which they were meant to be employed.