In recent years, organisations have attempted to mainstream other issues – gender, environment, rights-based approaches – and to develop institutional capacity accordingly. Lessons from this mainstreaming experience can be useful in developing institutional capacity for mainstreaming conflict sensitivity.

Although conflict sensitivity mainstreaming brings up different issues, in particular because of the inherently political nature of conflict, reflecting on how an agency has attempted to mainstream gender, environment, or a rights-based approach can suggest relevant ideas, actions and experiences.

Experience from the gender and environment fields, as well as from conflict, suggests that a multi-faceted approach to mainstreaming conflict sensitivity is likely to be most effective. Conflict is everybody’s business, and all staff have a role in either mitigating or exacerbating it. But it is also important to have specialists in the field who understand the local context from a conflict perspective and who can make case- and situation-specific observations and recommendations. Similarly, a headquarters based department can serve as an important repository of cross-agency and global learning, theory and approaches. Without a designated responsible department in headquarters, it is unclear how the learning from field staff and region-based specialists will be collected and disseminated to other regions, countries and projects.