How Great Expectations in Brussels are dashed in Tunis? A Bottom-up approach to the Implementation of the European Neighbourhood Policy in Tunisia

The literature on the ENP has traditionally adopted a top-down approach that frames the policy and its implementation from the EU point of view, by starting from the authoritative decision and analyzing the role of the EU centrally located actors and their instruments. While this “inside-out” perspective is fundamental, still it is not able to fully capture the “dilemmas of the implementation” that lay behind EU external policies. These studies are context free and do not shed light on how implementation actually works on the local ground in the recipient countries. The goal of this paper is to adopt a “reversed focus” in the implementation analysis of EU external policies. It argues that the top down perspective provides just a frame of explanation and that it should be integrated by a bottom-up approach able to highlight the peculiarities of the microimplementing environment. For this purpose, the ENP in Tunisia is adopted as a case study.