Democracy Support as an Important Aspect of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership? A Practice-Theoretical Take on Learning and Knowledge Production

Supporting political reforms and democratization has been a core aspect of the political pillar of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) since its inauguration. Yet, the state of democracy in almost all countries in the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean today is, in fact, worse than 30 years ago. Against this backdrop, this article investigates whether those involved in democracy support at the EU level have undergone any learning in the last thirty years. Conceptualizing learning within the frame of practice theory allows us to focus on the everyday practices of involved stakeholders, investigating their involvement and their learning or non-learning along the way. It also provides the foundations that enable us to distinguish between deep and surface learning. The full policy cycle, that is, agenda-setting, policy design, decision-making, implementation, and evaluation helps us nuance the EMP process in the field of democracy support over the past three decades. Our conclusion is that there has been some surface learning amongst involved actors but no deep learning. Knowledge production has been dominated by a rather closed community of practice, in which only a surface form of contestation takes place, resulting in the lack of critical reflection on background knowledge and thus a continuation of mainly EU malpractices in democracy support.