Interpreting the Cooperation between Regulators and the Regulated under the European Securities Markets Authority

The paper describes the framework of cooperation between the officials of ESMA and the representatives of the regulated entities, taking MiFID II as the main case study. Current working procedures - which date since ESMA's predecessor CESR - include written consultations, hearings and consultative groups. Mobility between ESMA and its constitutive national competent authorities, on the one hand, and the regulated companies and their federations, on the other, is a factor facilitating the cooperation between the two sides of financial regulation. This paper attempts to interpret the nature of this relationship by recourse to the concepts of "epistemic communities" (Haas, 1992) and "bureaucratic capital with a sector-specific technical basis" (Laurens, 2015) and explore its consequences on the operational understanding of "public interest" by the EU regulators and the socio-economic content of financial regulation.