ZBB 2026, 249
ESMA and EU Financial Market Governance Fifteen Years On: Soft Law, Functionality, and Expediency
This article examines the wide extent and diverse nature of ESMA soft law, including as regards its quasi-binding effects and its legitimation arrangements, some fifteen years after the 2011 establishment of ESMA. It finds that ESMA’s development and adoption of a range of different forms of soft law has given it an agile capacity to shape EU financial market governance. This capacity can be expected to strengthen given the ratchet effect of the ESMA incentives and other dynamics shaping the extent and nature of ESMA soft law. ESMA’s effective use of soft law is essential to the management of financial market risk, and so to the success of the Savings and Investments Union (SIU) project. There are, however, legitimation risks which suggest that a strengthening of ESMA’s legitimation arrangements could usefully form part of the SIU reform agenda.
Contents
- I. Introduction
- II. ESMA’s Incentives and the Scale of Soft Law
- III. Forms of ESMA Soft Law: The ESMA Regulation
- IV. Classifying ESMA Soft Law
- V. Incidence and Nature of ESMA Soft Law: The Apex Measure – Article 16 Guidelines
- VI. Incidence and Nature of ESMA Soft Law: Beyond Article 16 Guidelines
- 1. Q&As
- 2. Opinions
- 3. Public Statements
- 4. Supervisory Briefings
- 5. Other Measures
- 6. Incidence: the investment fund sector
- VII. A Quasi-binding Shadow Rulebook
- 1. Binding effects
- 2. Guidelines
- 3. Other forms of soft law
- VIII. Functionally Justified but Legitimation Risks
- 1. Functionally justified….
- 2. …Legitimation risks
- 3. A reasonable compromise
- IX. Looking to the Future
- *
- *)Professor of Law, Law School, London School of Economics and Political Science
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