The rapid changes affecting livestock in Vietnam concern production techniques, farm structures, and the organization of marketing chains. This livestock "revolution" deeply affects the whole social and economic organization of rural areas, the whole environment through pollution of soils and water, green?house?gaz emissions, land erosion due to feed production, sanitary risks, bio?diversity of local genetic resources, and economic welfare distribution. Those rapid changes are mainly driven by market forces and private firm strategies, but also by public rules affecting access to land, natural resources management, provisioning of services to producers, industrial technological transfers, food safety controls, and marketing practices. In that context, public authorities responsible for designing livestock policies at both National and Provincial level have to face a high complexity of processes. And the main challenge for them, in order to design sustainable livestock policies, are to know how to better balance livestock industrialization, social transformations and environmental management, in the light of the new resolution for agriculture, farmers and rural areas. The proposed methodology aims at setting up a livestock monitoring system likely to contribute to these efforts. The proposed system will be managed by an animating body (a team of 2 ou 3 researchers) and will rely on a strong participation of several research organizations, national and international. Il will include (i) data collection (original and secondary) ; (ii) analysis and response to questions ; (iii) dissemination and dialogue between stakeholders. The livestock monitoring system will aim at promoting partnerships to handle the complex questions related to sustainable livestock development policies in Vietnam. Problems will be talked at 3 levels: production systems; commodity chains; and local territories. Activities will include data?base management and mapping; field surveys on selected pro