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The purpose of this research is to contribute to the understanding of cooperation between EU member states – through EUNIC - in the field of culture in the MENA region. EUNIC is the European Union National Institutes for Culture, a network of European national institutions of culture and national bodies engaged in culture, that has emerged as a key player in the EU’s International Cultural Relations (ICR) strategy. The highly institutionalised and established cooperation between EUNIC members in Tunisia from 2016 through the Tfanen-Creative Tunisie project is compared to the lesser-documented case of Lebanon, to understand how and why cooperation among the EUNIC members present differs in these two cases. The paper adopts a practice approach which prioritises the views of the cultural practitioners involved in EUNIC clusters in these two countries, acquired through semi-structured interviews. This research highlights factors for cooperation, and at times competition, among EU national cultural institutes and cultural representatives. The findings indicate that the individuals who work within EU cultural institutes have a more substantial impact on how EU cultural institutes and embassies collaborate than the current literature accounts for. Moreover, the research reveals the importance of dialogue among cluster members in order to be trust, particularly noticeable in Lebanon where the mandates of the heads of cultural institutes in Lebanon are short and there has been no formal cluster presidency since 2019. Finally, this research suggests that the EU Delegation in Tunisia was able to move Tfanen from cultural diplomacy collaboration to strategic cooperation within a cultural relations and culture in development paradigm. While some elements of cooperation present in Tunisia could be replicated elsewhere, including in Lebanon, it is suggested that the Tfanen experience of EUNIC cooperation is not a pre-set model. Rather, the dynamics of strong intergovernmental cooperation in the Tfanen cultural relations project appear to be the result of the right ecosystem of actors.