1. Introduction
The Decentralisation of Livestock Services in the Eastern Regions of Indonesia, known as DELIVERI, aims to provide better livestock services to poor farmers in four pilot areas, primarily through reforming the Government of Indonesia's Directorate General of Livestock Services (DGLS) and its provincial and district divisions.

Although the project design predates the emergence of DFID's Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA), it does touch on two fundamental elements of the approach: the value of focusing on people rather than on resources, and the critical importance of ensuring that policies are based on sound understanding of ground-level realities.

Earlier partnerships between DFID and the DGLS had recognised that the greatest constraints to livestock development were no longer of a technical nature but were due to institutional weaknesses, including:

• poor contact between farmers and government livestock officers;
• over-centralised control of livestock services and the inaccessibility of reliable information to decision makers;
• adaptation of GoI's extension agents - over two decades - to support green revolution technologies. Since the latter were feasible only for wealthier farmers, the government services eventually became 'blind' to resource-poor farmers.

The project was to pilot new ways of addressing these constraints. Successes would be well documented, the pilots would serve as 'living demonstrations' and the information would be used to press for changes to make government livestock services, and other livestock-related institutions, more responsive to the needs of a newly prioritised client sector, i.e. poor farmers.