In today's dynamic rural development scenario, policies and institutional arrangements are key to mediating how the livestock sector develops, how current and former livestock keepers fare, and how well the needs of consumers - rich and poor, rural and urban - are served. Pro-poor policy and institutional change can be promoted through the building of quality linkages and relationships among sector actors as part of an incremental, iterative process by which policy and institutional changes are tried out and evaluated, and through which different stakeholder perspectives are brought to bear on the direction of such change.

Jeroen Dijkman
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
Rome, Italy
Jeroen.Dijkman@fao.org