The southern Mediterranean is already living with the converging pressures of climate stress, economic fragility, and geopolitical instability, and the strategic signals are difficult to ignore. Rising temperatures, water scarcity, fragile supply chains, and conflict are placing growing strain on regional infrastructure, food systems, and governance capacity, while the EU's own energy transition and migration politics add further complexity to an already volatile neighbourhood. Against this backdrop, the EU has launched the Pact for the Mediterranean, its most ambitious umbrella framework to date for relations with southern Mediterranean partners, structured around three pillars: People, stronger and more sustainable economies, and security, preparedness, and migration management. This initiative is best understood not as a departure from previous engagement but as an attempt to consolidate decades of fragmented regional policy into a more operational, project-oriented, and geopolitically coherent partnership.

This policy brief, developed under SLYCAN Trust's EU Work Programme, identifies a central structural concern in the Pact's current design: implementation asymmetry between its security-oriented and resilience-oriented dimensions. At present, the Pact's first Action Plan, launching 21 actions across a broader pipeline of over 100 initiatives, reflects meaningful ambition in scope, yet its security, border management, and emergency preparedness strands are far more concretely anchored than its climate, energy, and health dimensions, which remain implicit and unevenly operationalised. Governance challenges further complicate delivery, with responsibilities distributed across EU institutions, Member States, and a diverse set of southern partners, including Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, and others, whose political and institutional contexts vary considerably. At the same time, the Pact operates within a difficult external environment where conflict, fiscal pressures, and competing geopolitical interests risk narrowing its implementation toward border management and investment programming, rather than advancing the more integrated resilience agenda, linking decarbonisation, adaptation, infrastructure security, and social stability, that its framing promises.