In the Republic of Kosovo (RoK), the 2021 elections, relatively uniquely, featured Public Administration Reform (PAR) as one of the main topics offered by the victorious party, Vetëvendosje; it has subsequently been a key focus of the Kurti II government. Respective laws were finally passed late in 2022, and implementation is ongoing since then. Kosovo being (considered) the most volatile of the Western Balkan countries, and likely having attracted more outside advisory energy even than the others, this paper proposes to preliminarily outline, from a participant-observer perspective (and therefore with some limitations) yet both descriptively and premised on theoretical considerations, the “‘Small World’ of Technical Assistance to Administrative Reforms” as a building block for overall inquiry. Its working hypothesis is that, while there has been more of a market among the “usual suspect” organizations amongst one another, vis-à-vis the RoK it has been more of a battlefield, in that the respective organizations arguably engaged less in genuine dialogue, but rather tried to oppose those reforms, although – and that is crucial – the latter are well within the windows of general PAR legitimacy. Beyond the usual fashion-drivenness, several possible interpretations of this attitude should therefore be explored, from a perceived need to “keep full control” to genuine technocratic concerns, which however in this case may come with particularly high costs regarding democratic validity.

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Our study is about the chain of actors involved in the projects financed by pre-accession funds in Turkey.

Turkey (recognized as a candidate country in 1999 and with which negotiations for accession were opened in 2005) has benefited from European pre-accession funds since 2002. Despite the ups and downs of the

enlargement project and the stalemate in the accession negotiations from 2006 onwards, the pre-accession financial assistance scheme has not been called into question, at least until the attempted coup in July 2016 and its subsequent repression. This makes Turkey the country with the longest period of pre-accession financial assistance. Although it has been a key dimension of the Turkish accession process for years, financial assistance has been much less studied (apart from official reports by the European Commission or Court of Auditors and the European Parliament) than the government-led reform

processes. As for the studies of European projects in Turkey, few move away from programmatic objectives to question the projects and their effects in a different way (Babul, 2017; Le Chêne, 2021).

While no official database allows to trace projects from their programming to their realization, we have compiled all the contracts awarded between 2002 and 2014 in Turkey (each project may include differentcontracts, involving different types of actors and procedures). This database made it possible to conduct an analysis over time of the sectors and different structures involved in the projects as well as the geographical origin and type of actors recruited to implement them. We also conducted around sixty interviews with people involved in pre-accession policy and financial assistance (European and Turkish administrations, embassies of member countries, international organizations, private and public companies, third sector organizations).

This study allows us to outline the characteristics of the European assistance market in Turkey and also to assess the pre-accession effects. Considering that the actors which implement projects can be seen as a target audience of European programs, we argue that the EU has extended to Turkey its consultancy-based mode of governance, without allowing for a significant learning processes by Turkish actors of European ways of seeing and doing. First of all, the study highlights the low share of administrative twinning

(presence of European officials in Turkish administrations) in favor of service contracts, which is a major difference with the previous cases of Central and Eastern European countries. These twinning arrangements do not seem to be appreciated by the Turkish administration which considered them as too

intrusive and requiring too much commitment. The analysis of service contracts highlights a field largely preempted by private companies while university or third sector expertise has little access to it. As for the

geographical origin of the companies, 70% of contracts were awarded to companies located in European states, 30 % to Turkish companies or to subsidiaries of multinational consulting firms. While there is a very

high turnover of companies from one contract to the another, a very small number of multinationals have been awarded many contracts.