Social and environmental standards development organizations (SDOs) have been collaborating together within the ISEAL Alliance to construct ‘meta-standards'. These exercises in standards-setting are part of a longer-term process of transitioning innovative approaches to sustainable agriculture from diverse niches such as organic, fair trade and forest stewardship into a regime of certified sustainability. We see a role for the activities of intermediation in socio-technical transitions where we envision intermediation as a process of ‘accompanying change’. Using participant observation during the development of the Assurance Code within the ISEAL Alliance, we reflect upon the usefulness of this concept in understanding multi-stakeholder initiatives. We analyze the field testing activity based on salient issues, methodological approaches, and the relationship between stakeholders’ standards and the ISEAL meta-standards. Through our analysis we reflect upon the dynamic nature of intermediation as a participatory and representative activity. We suggest that this notion of intermediation might be usefully linked to studying sustainability transitions in a more consistent framework that links socio-technical dimensions of standards and socio-political dimensions of knowledge regimes.