A Country-led Programmatic Approach to Poverty-Environment Mainstreaming:
The PEI delivers financial and technical support for sustained capacity building to governments and other actors who take on the challenge of mainstreaming poverty-environment linkages into national development processes. For example, the PEI assists planning agencies to consider poverty-environment linkages, including climate change, in formulating economic and development policies, and helps environment agencies to engage with these policy processes more effectively. The PEI also supports civil society to engage in planning processes, making sure the voice of the poor is heard.
Based on experience to date, successful poverty-environment mainstreaming requires a programmatic approach — adapted to national circumstances. This framework has three phases and there are typically a cluster of tasks needed for each phase — for which a range of analytic tools can be used. [Handbook]

1. Preparatory Phase: Finding the Entry Points and Making the Case

The preparatory phase sets the stage for mainstreaming, focusing on activities designed to help countries identify entry points into the development planning process and to make a strong case for the importance of poverty-environment mainstreaming. Activities include conducting assessments of the country’s governmental, institutional, and political context as well as assessments that increase understanding of the nature of poverty-environment links. Raising awareness, building partnerships, assessing the institutional and capacity needs and setting up working mechanisms are also essential activities of the preparatory phase. [Economics primer]

2. Phase 1: Mainstreaming Poverty-Environment Linkages into Policy Processes

The next phase of the programmatic approach is concerned with integrating poverty-environment linkages into policy processes and the resulting policy measures. This step targets a specific policy process—such as a national development plan or sector strategy — identified as an entry point as part of the preparatory phase described above.

The elements of Phase 1 include developing new and targeted analytical studies to provide country-specific evidence about the nature of poverty-environment linkages in the country. Armed with such evidence, practitioners are better able to identify priorities and craft the arguments necessary to have an impact on the targeted policy process (such as a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper, Millennium Development Goal (MDG) strategy, or sector plan) and its associated documents. Once poverty-environment links have been integrated in the policy document, mainstreaming efforts continue with the development and initial costing of policy measures. These measures might be systemic interventions (such as fiscal measures) or they might be more narrowly focused, such as sector interventions (focusing for example on agricultural legislation, promotion of renewable energy, or the conservation of protected areas). Activities to strengthen institutions and capacities also occur throughout this phase.

3. Phase 2: Meeting the Implementation Challenge

The final, most sustained phase focuses on making poverty-environment mainstreaming operational through engagement in budgeting, implementation, and monitoring processes. These activities are aimed at ensuring that poverty-environment mainstreaming becomes established as normal procedure within the country. Meeting the implementation challenge calls for the integration of poverty-environment links in the national monitoring system. Phase 2 also requires engaging in budgeting processes to ensure that these processes incorporate the economic value of environment’s contribution to the national economy. Collaborating with sector and sub-national bodies to build their capacities to mainstream poverty-environment links within their work and effectively implement policy measures at various levels is also essential. In order to strengthen institutions and capacities in the long term, it is critical to establish poverty-environment mainstreaming as normal practice in government and administrative procedures, systems, and tools at all levels.