The use of EU (European Union) conditionality as a governance tool is growing in popularity. Yet, it confronts member state governments with the conundrum of needing to enact domestically unpopular policies if they want to uphold EU obligations. One tactic used by governments to lessen this dilemma is blame avoidance. However, further research is needed to fully understand the strategies that governments choose. This chapter gives an overview of the book and presents the research question. The literature on blame avoidance techniques is presented in the first part. The overview demonstrates that there are no ready-made answers for how governments choose blame avoidance strategies while subject to EU conditionality. The second section makes the case that while EU conditionality constrains the availability of blame avoidance strategies, governments’ choice from the still-available presentational blame avoidance strategies depends on the policymaking context. An outline of the research methodology and empirical results is given in the third part. I then describe the book’s contribution to EU scholarship. Lastly, I present the book’s plan.