Drought vulnerability assessment of cattle producers in the Sierras del Este-Uruguay: Interactions between actors and agents

Droughts significantly impact livestock systems over natural grasslands. Nevertheless, the practices adopted by cattle producers are usually not adaptive, and therefore they deepen the impacts of the drought and its vulnerability. Drought vulnerability assessments have implicitly considered vulnerability as an individual phenomenon and have not considered the interactions of actors and agents as a key attribute. Social network analysis (SNA) can be used to analyse these processes. However, researchers have largely used SNA from a static perspective and failed to not consider that external drivers could modify the network. The objective of this work was to analyse the incidence of interactions between cattle producers, institutions and agricultural technicians and the effect of such interactions on drought vulnerability from a dynamic perspective. We worked with two operational frameworks, SNA and the incidence of external drivers on the network. Our primary results highlight that (1) cattle producers of greater centrality present lower vulnerability; (2) central cattle producers are not necessarily identified by other producers by the management they carry out; (3) the primary external driver partially affects the structure of the network; and (4) the existence of rigidity and poverty traps and difficulties hindering the propagation and consolidation of practices that reduce drought vulnerability became evident. Our findings enable the identification of potentialities and barriers in the transfer of information to increase adaptation and reduce vulnerability to drought and provide a framework that could be applicable to other productive sectors, threats and geographical contexts.