Mainstreaming adaptation into development: Everybody's business is nobody's business

Mainstreaming adaptation into development can offer several advantages such as reducing costs, building consensus, and generating ownership leading to better adaptation outcomes. Current level of mainstreaming adaptation into development is at a very nascent stage and doesn't exploit the full potential of mainstreaming. Considering mainstreaming as a progressive concept, the current level of mainstreaming can be at best be between serendipitous adaptation and climate proofing of development and hence there is a long way to achieve what is called the discrete adaptation. Several bottlenecks existing in the current approach to mainstreaming adaptation which is largely has to do with the way the development is planned and implemented. For an effective mainstreaming, it is important to identify entry points of adaptation, decide about how much to mainstream, establishing a decision making framework that helps in bringing all stakeholders together, providing clear financial and human resources for the process, establishing a measurement framework that helps in checking the progress in mainstreaming adaptation, and implementing required capacity building programs for all the involved stakeholders. It is important to note that not all stakeholders may be interested in measuring and reporting procedures for mainstreaming purposes since it might increase the administrative overheads.

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