Table 2.

Overview of the goals and causal insights of the three studies. In the last column we draw conclusions about the implications of the given study for the design of poverty alleviation strategies (only studies 1 and 2 explicitly address implications for policy)

Example	Goal of causal inquiry	Accounts of causation	Claims about causal effect or explanation	Implications for poverty alleviation strategies
Bandiera et al. (2017)	To quantify the effect of an intervention to push poor households out of poverty	Manipulability account	Providing livestock and training to women in poor households caused a change in labor activities which resulted in an 21% increase in net annual earnings relative to control households	Poverty can be alleviated by providing individuals in households assets and the skills to use them
Lade et al. (2017)	To enhance understanding of how context influences the effectiveness of poverty alleviation strategies	Manipulability account Mechanism-based account	The effectiveness of a poverty alleviation strategy depends on the relation between agricultural practices and the biophysical environment in a given place. Neglecting these relations can reinforce poverty	Before intervening in a particular place it is important to consider the relation between agricultural practices and the social-ecological environment.
Boonstra and de Boer (2014)	To explain the emergence of poverty traps through historical and path- dependent processes	Mechanism-based account	A poverty trap emerges when a conjuncture of events triggers a path-dependent process and there are reinforcing processes that reproduce the trap	Structural conditions need to be changed so that a conjunction of social and environmental events that may produce trap processes cannot happen