Events & Gatherings

Politicising vulnerabilities: PNT's analytical framework

From the outset, the organisers recalled that the aim is not to juxtapose specialised diagnoses on energy, public finances or agriculture, but to understand how these dimensions are articulated within a single system of vulnerabilities.

The Tunisian case appears particularly revealing in this respect. Tunisia combines a strong energy dependency, an unfinished energy transition, significant food dependency, a subsidy system that is difficult to reform, weak growth, an under-invested productive apparatus and weakened institutions. It thus constitutes a laboratory for the tensions that many states of the Global South will face in a context of geopolitical fragmentation, global energy transition and the multiplication of shocks.

Energy prices, subsidies, agricultural inputs, foreign-currency reserves, monetary statistics and storage capacities are not mere technical variables. They constitute the concrete sites where the material sovereignty of states is at stake.

Politicising these issues does not mean ideologising them. It means making visible the power trade-offs, the distributive effects and the institutional constraints that determine how they are managed.

An economy weakened even before the geopolitical shock

The debates underlined that Tunisia is not approaching the Middle Eastern shock from a position of resilience, but from an economy that is already deeply weakened.

The growth officially reported on a year-on-year basis masks a more degraded reality. According to the analyses presented during the workshop, Tunisia's real GDP would have declined by approximately 0.3% in the first quarter of 2026, while year-on-year comparisons benefit mainly from a base effect linked to the weakness of activity in 2025.

GDP per capita remains below its level prior to the Covid-19 crisis. This prolonged stagnation reflects less a cyclical crisis than a progressive exhaustion of the Tunisian growth model.

The situation of the labour market illustrates this silent degradation. Speakers stressed that the unemployment rate is no longer sufficient to describe the real state of the economy. The central problem now lies in the collapse of the activity rate.

According to the figures discussed during the workshop, Tunisia's activity rate would have fallen to around 45%, one of the lowest in Africa and far below the global average. This decline reflects both the absence of job creation and the silent withdrawal of a growing share of the population from the labour market.

Investment constitutes a second major warning signal. Participants converged on the observation of a country that no longer invests sufficiently. Public investment budgeted in the finance laws is very largely under-executed, while private investment appears almost at a standstill.

Tunisian banks themselves point to the absence of genuine structuring investment projects. Imports of capital goods have remained depressed for several years, and the rare recoveries observed seem more linked to one-off purchases than to a genuine productive dynamic.

But the core of the diagnosis presented during the workshop concerns the monetary and financial structure of the Tunisian economy.

The figures from ECOWEEK and the Central Bank show a strong expansion of the money supply. According to ECOWEEK No. 19-26, the M3 money supply grew by 10.5% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, while credit to the economy increased by only 3.1%. Banknotes and coins rose by 17.8%, reaching 27.3 billion dinars, or 18.3% of M3. Cash relative to GDP reached 15.1%, compared with 11.7% in 2021, even as credit to the economy grew weakly. Banknotes and coins in circulation are rising rapidly, while the share of cash in GDP is reaching historically high levels.

This evolution reflects several simultaneous phenomena: real inflation stronger than officially measured, growing distrust of the banking system, the rise of the informal sector and a preference for holding foreign currency.

The debates particularly emphasised the transformation of the Tunisian banking system into an instrument for financing the Treasury.

Banks now hold a growing share of sovereign debt, while credit to businesses slows sharply. The more banks finance the state, the less they finance the real economy. The more they accumulate sovereign risk, the more vulnerable they become to a budgetary crisis.

The Central Bank itself appears increasingly mobilised in the service of financing the state, which fuels concerns about a monetisation of the deficit.

This dynamic feeds what several participants described as a genuine fiduciary crisis. Credit to the central government now represents 37.2% of GDP, according to the figures discussed during the workshop, compared with 17.6% in 2021. The Central Bank holds 35.5% of claims on the state on its balance sheet, while Tunisian banks carry nearly 18.7% of sovereign claims among their assets.

The economy continues to function, but at the cost of a growing dependence on monetary expansion, domestic indebtedness and the capture of financial resources by the state.

The Middle Eastern shock as a multiplier of vulnerabilities

The war in the Middle East acts as a systemic stress test for the Tunisian economy.

The debates stressed a central point: the crisis is not transmitted solely through prices. It is also transmitted through the physical availability of goods, logistical disorganisation, tensions on maritime routes and the lengthening of supply lead times.

The energy shock thus rapidly becomes a budgetary shock, then a productive shock and finally a social shock.

Rising oil and gas prices immediately increase the cost of energy subsidies, weigh on the trade deficit and exert additional pressure on foreign-currency reserves.

But the effects then spread to agricultural inputs, transport costs, fertilisers, refined products and all production chains.

The debates showed that Tunisia is particularly vulnerable to this logic of cascading transmission.

Energy dependency increases pressure on the budget; this budgetary pressure reinforces the banking system's dependence on financing the state; rising energy costs are transmitted to food prices; and inflation reduces the purchasing power of already weakened households.

Several presentations also underlined that Tunisian adjustment is already taking place partly through shortages.

When the state can no longer simultaneously finance all the necessary imports, it prioritises certain products considered politically sensitive — notably the soft wheat destined for subsidised bread — at the expense of other components of the food or industrial system.

This logic progressively weakens the dairy, meat and animal-feed sectors, while degrading the nutritional quality of consumption.

The Middle Eastern crisis thus reveals less a temporary problem than a growing structural dependence on external supply chains that have become unstable.

Energy dependency: the strategic cost of non-transition

The second session of the workshop helped to clarify the nature of Tunisia's energy dependency.

According to the figures raised during the debates and the technical presentations, Tunisia covers only between 30 and 35% of its energy needs, depending on whether the gas royalty linked to Algerian transit is included.

The official energy dependency rate reaches around 65%, but it would be close to 70% if the TransMed royalty were neutralised.

This precision is important, because part of the energy counted as a national resource in fact depends on an external geopolitical flow.

Gas constitutes the nodal point of this dependency. Tunisian electricity generation still relies more than 90% on natural gas, mainly imported from Algeria. Gas dependency thus becomes an electrical, industrial and budgetary dependency.

The discussions recalled that Tunisia had had to import Algerian electricity during recent summer consumption peaks, including in periods when Algeria was itself carrying out power cuts on its own territory.

This relationship creates an asymmetric interdependence: Tunisia remains far more vulnerable to a supply interruption than Algeria is to a loss of Tunisian transit.

The presentation devoted to the energy transition nevertheless stressed an essential point: the transition to renewable energy cannot be conceived as a simple technical substitution.

Solar and wind are intermittent resources. Their integration requires storage capacities, robust grids, interconnections, suitable governance and a STEG capable of ensuring the stability of the electrical system.

Electricity, moreover, represents only a fraction of final energy consumption. Transport, certain industrial uses and thermal uses remain heavily dependent on hydrocarbons.

Tunisia's delay in renewables is therefore not explained by the absence of solar or wind potential. It results from a combination of factors: budgetary crisis, financing difficulties, the weakness of STEG, administrative delays, regulatory instability and the absence of a structured industrial ecosystem.

The debates also underlined the risk of an energy transition reduced to a purely extractive logic.

If the large renewable projects are developed exclusively by international companies, without local content, without an industrial strategy and without training, Tunisia will indeed reduce part of its energy bill, but without building a genuine national productive fabric.

The energy transition would then become a mechanism for reducing the external deficit, without any deep transformation of the economic model.

Food security: from cereals to inputs

The third session of the workshop profoundly shifted the food debate.

The Tunisian problem does not lie solely in dependence on cereal imports; it concerns the entire agricultural production chain.

The presentation devoted to agricultural inputs recalled a central idea: a country that is vulnerable in its inputs is vulnerable across its entire food chain.

Modern agriculture relies on a heavy consumption of energy, fertilisers, transport and chemical products.

Natural gas, ammonia, urea, sulphur, fuels, maritime insurance and trade routes have become essential components of food security.

The Strait of Hormuz was thus presented as a food chokepoint as much as an energy one. The data discussed during the workshop recall that around 20% of global oil trade, one-fifth of global liquefied natural gas trade and 35% of global urea exports transit through this maritime route.

A major share of global trade in oil, liquefied natural gas and urea passes through it. A lasting disruption of this route directly affects fertiliser costs, then agricultural yields and finally global food prices.

Tunisia appears particularly vulnerable in this configuration.

Its cereal self-sufficiency rate remains low, while its storage capacities, water resources and input production remain limited.

The climate crisis further accentuates these constraints. The exploitation of deep aquifers is reaching critical levels, and water fragility pushes agriculture to compensate with more chemical inputs, which further increases external dependence.

The debates therefore proposed moving beyond the unrealistic objective of full cereal self-sufficiency in order to think in terms of genuine food sovereignty from the upstream.

This approach implies securing critical inputs, diversifying suppliers, building strategic stocks and rethinking agricultural policies in connection with energy and climate constraints.

Compensation: between social buffer and budgetary lock

The discussion on compensation showed that Tunisian subsidies cannot be reduced to a mere budgetary burden.

The compensation system constitutes at once a mechanism of social stabilisation, a historical instrument of price management and an implicit component of the Tunisian social contract.

The debates recalled that compensation has been progressively institutionalised since the 1940s in a context of provisioning, drought and price control.

Over time, it became a buffer between international prices and domestic prices.

This historical depth explains why any reform appears politically sensitive.

Compensation does not only protect consumers. It also reduces uncertainty for certain producers, notably in the bakery, cereals and processed-food sectors.

But this system also produces distortions: delays in reimbursement, the concentration of actors able to absorb administrative delays, dependence on the state and the growing opacity of real costs.

Participants stressed that an abrupt abolition of subsidies would be socially explosive.

But the absence of reform would prolong another type of adjustment: hidden inflation, shortages, degradation of product quality and the worsening of deficits.

The real challenge is therefore to move gradually from a generalised system of opaque subsidies to a targeted, legible and sustainable social protection system.

Such a reform cannot, however, succeed without social mediation, without a reliable social register and without a political strategy capable of explaining the trade-offs.

Three scenarios for the coming years

The debates converged on three possible scenarios.

The first scenario, an optimistic one, rests on a gradual stabilisation of the Middle Eastern context, an easing of energy and input prices, a limited recovery of investment and external financial support enabling certain margins of manoeuvre to be progressively restored.

This scenario remains conceivable, but it presupposes a significant improvement in economic governance, institutional coordination and the credibility of reforms.

The second scenario, considered the most probable in the short term, is one of prolonged tensions.

The economy would then continue to operate in low gear: weak growth, persistent inflation, insufficient investment, growing internal financing of the deficit and diffuse social adjustment.

In this configuration, shortages would remain occasional but recurrent, and the state would continue to prioritise incompressible expenditure at the expense of investment and the maintenance of infrastructure.

The third scenario is one of a simultaneous worsening of energy, food, budgetary and monetary constraints.

In this case, a lasting rise in energy prices combined with logistical disruptions and a weakening of the dinar could lead to major tensions: import difficulties, rapid degradation of public energy enterprises, acceleration of food inflation and the multiplication of social tensions.

Adjustment would then no longer take place through reform, but through rationing, shortages and the accelerated degradation of public services.

Towards a doctrine of economic sovereignty

What the seminar contributed to PNT's identity

The discussions revealed a shared diagnosis: the geopolitical shift has already taken place. Multilateralism is no longer a structuring framework, but an eroding system. International norms are contested or circumvented. Power relations are being reshaped around logics of raw force, regional fragmentation and generalised transactionalism. In this context, states — including those in North Africa — increasingly appear as weakened entities, caught between sovereigntist rhetoric and the effective loss of sovereignty.

This observation profoundly redefines PNT's mission. The organisation cannot situate itself either in the continuation of traditional aid frameworks or within technocratic, sectoral approaches. It positions itself as a space for the repoliticisation of contemporary issues, aiming to reintroduce the political dimension where it has been displaced by technical categories such as resilience, governance, efficiency and transition.

The exchanges also highlighted a fundamental shift in the development paradigm. International aid, historically tied to a multilateral order and to a function of projecting influence, is being transformed into a system of risk management — heavily financialised and oriented towards mobilising the private sector. This transformation is accompanied by a shift of responsibility onto local actors, without any real redistribution of capacities for action. Development thus ceases to be a project of transformation and becomes a mechanism of adaptation to exogenous constraints.

In this context, the notion of agency emerged as central. Who decides? Who acts? Who bears responsibility for transformations?

The dominant response today tends to marginalise local societies while externalising strategic decisions. PNT's specific objective is precisely to contribute to rebuilding this capacity for action, by articulating strategic reflection, critical analysis and the production of alternative frameworks.

Another major insight from the discussions concerns the need to think transitions in their plurality and interdependence. Energy transition, industrial transformation, technological mutations, geopolitical reconfigurations and social evolutions can no longer be addressed in isolation. They belong to the same historical moment, characterised by uncertainty, unpredictability and acceleration.

In such an environment, strategy can no longer be conceived as linear planning grounded in stable assumptions. It must integrate volatility, conflictuality and the possibility of abrupt ruptures. This means moving beyond managerial approaches to governance in order to reintroduce political reflection on trade-offs, priorities and trajectories.

Finally, the inaugural seminar underlined the specific role of North Africa as a strategic space. Located at the interface between Africa, Europe and the Middle East, the region concentrates the effects of global reconfigurations: the fragmentation of multilateralism, the redefinition of value chains, security tensions and the transformation of development models. It is at once a space of vulnerability and a potential laboratory for strategic recomposition.

Within this framework, PNT sees itself as an incubator for collective strategic reflection, capable of bringing together actors from different backgrounds — researchers, practitioners, decision-makers and civil-society members — in order to produce analyses rooted in regional realities while engaging with global dynamics.

The aim is not to propose immediate solutions, but to rebuild the conditions for autonomous strategic thinking — a prerequisite for any form of sovereignty, development, and ultimately, democratisation.

Synthesis of presentations and discussions

A shift that has already occurred

The roundtable organised by the Policy Network for Transitions takes place in a context marked by a profound transformation of the international system. One of the most striking observations from the discussions is that the geopolitical shift is no longer a hypothesis but a reality. The post-Cold War world — structured by multilateralism, international norms and Western hegemony — is now fading away.

Participants converge on the idea that we have entered a world characterised by fragmentation, the rise of power-based logics and the erosion of normative frameworks. This transformation affects not only international relations, but also the paradigms of development, humanitarian action and conflict management.

From post-multilateralism to post-development: repoliticising strategy in a fragmenting world

The historical moment we have entered can no longer be understood as a simple phase of gradual transition. On the contrary, the discussions converged on the idea that the shift has already occurred. We are not on the eve of a change in the international order; we are already living in the world that follows. This observation, which runs through both geopolitical analyses and reflections on development, requires us to thoroughly revise the categories that have structured international political thought in recent decades.

Multilateralism, development, governance, resilience — even democratisation itself — can no longer be invoked as self-evident truths or as neutral frameworks. They must be re-examined in light of their historical conditions of formation, their political uses and their current exhaustion.

One of the most important achievements of the discussion was precisely its refusal to treat as separate what dominant language presents as distinct domains: geopolitics on one side, development on the other; conflicts on one side, public policy on the other; systemic constraints on one side, national room for manoeuvre on the other. On the contrary, everything today points to a growing entanglement of the political, economic, technological, military and social.

The vocabulary remains that of development, cooperation or stability, even though the underlying logics are now those of power, securitisation, fragmentation and risk management.