Albania’s labour market offers a sharp view of functional contestation in practice. Reforms aimed at aligning labour standards, skills policies, and tax regimes with the acquis often collide with structural realities: high unemployment, pervasive informality, limited administrative capacity, and sustained emigration. Norms are adopted on paper yet generate outcomes that quietly erode their intended effects. Functional contestation captures this dynamic, where resistance is less ideological than embedded in misfits between EU templates and domestic socio-economic structures. Within these gaps, external actors such as Türkiye, China, and Gulf states advance alternative models of engagement. Albania thus illuminates how contestation can be enacted through policy practice, not just rhetorical defiance, reshaping the meaning of ‘approximation’ itself.