Negotiated stagnation: Textual alignment without substantive anchoring in EU democracy support to Tunisia

This article examines how EU-supported democratic governance reforms in Tunisia after 2011 remained legally and procedurally active despite weak substantive anchoring. Using comparative process tracing of anti-corruption and decentralization reforms, it shows how implementation constraints became objects of consultation, technical assistance, and institutional follow-up while enforcement capacity, fiscal authority, institutional autonomy, and accountability relations remained fragile. The article argues that this pattern cannot be reduced to implementation failure, domestic constraints, or the limits of EU influence considered separately. It conceptualizes the outcome as negotiated stagnation and identifies negative coproduction as the interactional logic through which fragmented domestic reform politics and external reform-support practices sustained reform activity without resolving underlying anchoring deficits.