Mainstreaming

Pilot or policy Mainstreaming is the act of broadening the application of a change or innovation from a small-scale pilot to the whole of a programme or policy domain. It involves recognising that the results of an experiment are positive and the learning deserves to be applied more widely. It thus requires three mechanisms, to:
* finance and conduct experiments
* distinguish success from failure
* scale up the successes
Other related terms include capacity building and embedding.
History and background
The term owes its origins to the battle in schools in the USA over the rights of children with disabilities to be educated in mainstream schools. It came to prominence in Europe in the mid-1990s through Gender mainstreaming - the assumption that gender is always a crucial variable in policy-making and service delivery - which had itself been mainstreamed thanks to the support of institutions such as the UN and EU.
The principle of embedding successful experiences has been generalised by the EU. The definition of the term has however generally been left implicit - the bibliography below includes a sample of scholarly papers - in all of them, a definition of mainstreaming is taken for granted.
Mainstreaming in the European context
In the EU context, the term has now been extended to describe a process whereby the results of pilot projects become integrated into wider practice and programmes such as the European Social Fund (ESF) and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) Structural Fund programmes and into policy both at EU level and Member State level.
Here, it is perceived to have two dimensions:
* vertical where the influence is on policy
* horizontal where the influence is on practice
Within the INTERREG ERDF framework, Mainstreaming has no clear definition. The term is defined briefly within INTERREG IVC (cross regional cooperation) as follows:
"Mainstreaming, also called ‘transfer process’, is the process of integrating new knowledge and good practices into the Convergence, Competitiveness & Employment and European Territorial Cooperation objectives, through interregional cooperation."
The concept was used extensively in the EQUAL Community Initiative where
EQUAL institutionalised the mainstreaming process by structuring its programme into three phases:
# Action 1 was intended to last six months and was dedicated to programme design and transnational partnership building
# Action 2 was normally for two years and was the main implementation phase
# Action 3 for mainstreaming and dissemination
The three-phase structure of EQUAL along with its development partnerships structure were major drivers of innovation in the programme and appear to have produced good results despite early criticisms that the programme had a slow start.
In the wake of EQUAL, the idea is being incorporated into that of social experimentation, according to which mainstreaming will be greatly facilitated if:
* the experiment is conducted with some scientific rigour, for instance having a control group
* implementing authorities 'buy in' beforehand, and undertake to mainstream the innovation if the experiment proves to be a success.
Bibliography
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Examples of papers that use the term Mainstreaming without clearly defining it:
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