Even after relationships are established, an inordinate amount of time is often still required to develop the necessary common language and integrated cross-sector conceptualisation. Therefore, biodiversity mainstreaming can easily require 10 years of effort, well beyond the span of a single project, budget or political cycle of an institution. The continuity required within organisations to sustain long projects is often limited, with changes in staff, budget and strategies often occurring at shorter frequencies during the course of a biodiversity mainstreaming project. Successful biodiversity mainstreaming in South Africa has thus often occurred through layering interventions from a series of sequential donor funded projects. Later projects have been able to capitalise on established relationships developed during earlier projects.