The regulation of Sustainable Finance: UE Taxonomy between interests and ideas. The (First) "Ideas" of Expert Knowledge in the Platform on Sustainable Finance.

The European Commission in the Action Plan on Financing Sustainable Growth assigns a substantial role to Sustainable Finance in the path towards sustainability. Since 2018 in Europe a process of regulating Sustainable Finance has started and in accordance with the rationale applied for European governance, it includes many stakeholders. Among different interventions, substantial developments have been made especially thanks to the publication of the EU Taxonomy Regulation 2020/8526 and its subsequent Delegated Acts 2021/21397 and 2021/21788, but also whit the Social Taxonomy. The process involved several actors, from the Commission's official advisory groups to Parliament. The process is interesting for 3 main reasons: 1. the representations underlying the regulatory decisions of sustainable finance; 2. the relationship between the latter and the actors included in the process; 3. the interests linked to the representations and mechanisms that these representations trigger. Concerning the first point, central is the role played by the experts who are directing the action of the European Commission. But what cognitive and normative representations make up the “world view” such players convey? This paper aims at bringing out some cognitive and normative representations made by the experts included in the Platform on Sustainable Finance in their role as mediators. Specifically, this paper – starting from the assumption that the experts included in the PSF not only play a manifest role of bringing a technical truth, but they also play a latent role of mediator of a certain “world view”- uses the analytical approach of the référentiel and some artefacts created by the PSF. This paper begins by defining the concept of Sustainable Finance and describing the fundamental European regulatory steps in this sector. The second part of the paper, by introducing the study case of the Platform on Sustainable Finance, analyses the relevant stakeholders through the literature regarding the role of knowledge into the decision-making processes. While the third section aims at presenting the methodology and the analytical approach used. Last section reports the main achieved empirical evidence applied to a PSF subgroup. This last part results from a preliminary analysis aimed at assessing the validity of the methodological approach and from one of the analysis’ tools likely to be used to complete that.