**2. Literature Review and Conceptual Framework**

The definitions and conceptual framework used to identify factors affecting livestock farmers' agricultural drought resilience to food insecurity in Northern Cape Province, South Africa, were adopted from international and national studies/literature.

There are different definitions for resilience with shared characteristics [19–22]. However, nearly all definitions stress the common elements of resilience: ability, mitigation, adaptation, coping, recovery, withstanding shocks, resistance, and bouncing back against shocks. Resilience in this study is considered to be the ability of a household to "bounce

back" after exposure to livelihood threats, shocks, or stressors (such as agricultural drought and vulnerability to food insecurity).

Household resilience to food insecurity is defined as the ability of a household to maintain a certain level of well-being (food security) when faced with agricultural drought, and depends on the options available to make a living, and on the ability to handle agricultural drought. Therefore, it refers to ex ante actions aimed at reducing or mitigating agricultural drought and ex post actions to cope with agricultural drought. Thus, the options available for a household to make a living and cope with agricultural drought will determine the resilience of the household [23]. In scenarios where the ecosystems that communities depend on during shocks are vulnerable and exhibit eroding resilience, it is evident that the coping and adaptive strategies tend to overlap. Therefore, the concept of resilience stresses the dynamic nature of agricultural drought and usefully categorizes resilience into absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities. Absorptive capacity highlights the ability to show an initial "persisting" response to cope with agricultural drought. Adaptive capacity reflects the ability to function consistently as before in the face of incremental changes in climate change shocks, including agricultural drought. Transformative capacity reflects the ability to show a substantial changing response to agricultural drought or prolonged disturbance, including value systems, regimes, financial systems, technological systems, and biological systems [24,25].

Further, it might involve improving infrastructure, supporting social protection mechanisms, providing basic social services, or developing institutional capacity. These changes might be voluntarily chosen or forced (such as conflict forcing people to flee their country). To be successful, these transformational changes typically require shifts in economic and social policies, land use legislation, and resource management practices, as well as inclusion of various institutions and social practices [24,25].

Food insecurity is defined as a household's inability to meet target consumption levels in the face of shocks, such as agricultural drought [14]. In this paper, the concept of resilience to food insecurity refers to the adaptive capacity of smallholder livestock farmers in Northern Cape Province of South Africa.

Rockstrom [26] highlighted that social, economic, situational, and institutional preparedness to cope with stresses and shocks as well as their effects are the core mechanisms of household resilience to food insecurity. In addition, numerous studies have documented several factors determining the means and processes of achieving household resilience [27–31].

Various resilience analysis frameworks have been suggested [32]. However, Hoddinott [33] argues that the plethora of frameworks for resilience analysis have similar components. These include highlighting the broader environment in which a household (or individual or some other unit of observation) resides; the resources available to that household; how that household uses those resources; how the economic returns on those uses are affected by shocks that the household experiences; and how the outcomes of those uses lead to consumption of food and other goods and services, savings, health, nutritional status, and other such outcomes.

Therefore, resilience frameworks commonly guide studies on household resilience to food insecurity [14,34,35]. This study adopted an updated framework developed by Alinovi et al. [22,36]. Figure 1 presents the conceptual framework applied in this study. The selection of the framework is justified, because it is mainly proposed for analysis (Equations (5)–(7)) of households' resilience to food security shocks such as agricultural drought. This framework elicits the extent of resilience-building variation from one household to another and that the variation is determined by diverse factors. Factors include assets (herd/flock size (HFS); agricultural assets (AA); non-agricultural assets (NAA)), adaptive capacity (perception; source of income (Incsource); migration; credit), social safety nets (cash; training; food support; water rights; garden equipment; sanitary latrines, farm input), climate change (occurrence and intensity of drought). The factors are associated

with the outcome variable of the agricultural drought resilience index (ADRI) as illustrated in Figure 1 and Equations (5)–(7).

**Figure 1.** Conceptual framework of the study. Source: Authors' work from observations of various studies.

As shown in Figure 1 and Equation (5), the ADRI is calculated using principal component analysis (PCA) and variables related to livestock production and consumption with or without a drought season. Furthermore, as demonstrated in Figure 1 and Equations (6) and (7), the ADRI is determined using a structural equation model against independent variables as aggregate and disaggregate variables of assets, adaptive capacity, social safety nets, and climate change.
