Underpinning and steering the migration mainstreaming process, countries will need to create a dedicated institutional structure to ensure follow-through and ownership by national stakeholders. While each country will find its own, context-specific solution as to who will guide the process and which stakeholders are to be involved, the GMG handbook provides an indicative set-up for a support structure consisting of:

• A national focal point within government, in charge of leading and coordinating the mainstreaming process;
• An expert facilitator to support the national focal point;
• A small support group of government, UN country team (UNCT) and potentially civil society stakeholders to provide expert advice and technical assistance to the focal point and facilitator;
• An inter-ministerial mechanism;
• A larger multi-stakeholder consultative mechanism.

While the role of this proposed architecture is primarily to facilitate the above outlined process, migration mainstreaming also seeks to achieve a number of sustainable changes to the manner in which a country addresses migration and development institutionally. These institutional aims of mainstreaming can be characterized as:

1. to ensure regular coordination and cooperation between different ministries and departments, thus fostering greater institutional coherence or what is called a ‘whole-of-government’ approach;
2. to engage all relevant levels of government (local, sub-national, national, regional) as appropriate, advancing vertical coherence; and
3. to facilitate the institutionalization of regular multi-stakeholder consultations, including with non-governmental actors to ensure broad national ownership of the process and its outcomes.