This policy brief highlights key lessons from the Poverty-Environment Initiative/Poverty-Environment Action experience, notably on:

• The constraints imposed by fragmented and outdated institutional structures and information flows that reflect past priorities and narrower interests than face decision-makers today
• The need to build trust as a precondition and driver of integration
• The importance of addressing gender and inequality, both to generate this trust and to tackle the underlying causes of many poverty-environment problems
• The need to offer the space and to build the capacity to adopt integrated approaches
• The value of using normal, existing in-country policy/decision-making cycles – finding the right entry points into them, and then working with and enriching those processes

Based on this and complementary experience, it proposes a practical organizing framework for integration – organized around the typical decision-making cycle of planning, budgeting, investing, executing, monitoring, review and dialogue. Integration in one step reinforces results in another.

The new PEA Handbook, Sustainable Development in practice: a guide to Integrating Environment, Climate, and Poverty Reduction, offers detailed guidance on tasks, tools and tactics for each step.