The challenge to integrate environmental issues (and particularly climate) and development has never been more urgent. Infrastructure and agriculture must be climate-proofed. Industry must be energy-, materials-, and water-efficient. Poor people’s environmental deprivations must be tackled. Their environmental rights must be recognised and supported. Environmental institutions need to work more closely together with other institutions – for too many of which the environment is treated as an externality.

There has been considerable effort to achieve such mainstreaming, with some successes. But, overall, we are still struggling in this endeavour. Change remains slow. There persists a tendency to pursue supply-driven approaches rather than responding to genuine demand. There is too much untested, expert-driven guidance on how to go about ‘environmental mainstreaming’ tasks, but there has been little sharing of experience on conducting these tasks in the context of advocacy, analysis, planning, investment, management, and monitoring. We need to focus much more on linking institutions and learning from experience of ‘what works’ for environmental mainstreaming.