We have clarified that environmental mainstreaming is primarily a long-term institutional affair. Thus the initial challenges tend to be more about understanding and handling current ‘mainstream’ institutions and governance than they are about understanding environment. This is a matter of:

• Identifying what is holding mainstream institutions (formal and informal, government and non-government) back from a full consideration of environment;

• Spotting and exploiting ‘entry points’ into the governance processes, especially where these offer opportunities for systemic change;

• Identifying the ‘drivers’ – notably policy concerns and initiatives that are open to environmental integration (often connected to environmentally-sensitive sectors such as energy and agriculture);

• Making sure that environmentally-dependent (and often marginalised) groups are heard;

• Working with both the mainstream authorities and change agents – some of whom may indeed come from environment groups.

However, once progress has been made in some of these institutional challenges, there will indeed be technical environmental issues to address – the key challenges here being:

• Making economic, fiscal and developmental ‘cases’ for pro-environment change in mainstream (development) institutions and (investment) decisions;

• Briefing decision-makers on what might be quite complex environment-development issues in ways that they find both comprehensible and compelling.

Key choices need to be made, especially about entry points, drivers and cases to make. Therefore strategy – which is the ‘art of choice’ – perhaps best sums up the environmental mainstreaming challenge. In the next section, we examine experience in effective mainstreaming, which we hope will prove valuable to readers in developing strategy to suit their own contexts and needs.