Standards for everything: electronic payment cards, sustainable soy production, sustainability reporting, software etcetera: standards are ubiquitous.
Where there are standards, there are usually several of them to standardize the same thing, process, method. Then, users complain and start to call for their harmonization. This demand is easy to understand. Just as it is easy to understand that the proliferation of standards is a naturally occuring process. From the Big Bang, to the formation of stars and galaxies, living systems, communities, cities, economic powers: things clump together and diversify and branch out, then clump together and at a certain point things emerge with new qualities at a new level.
This is by now generally accepted knowledge among scientists in the systems sciences. This is reflected in this lecture by professor Lenard Troncale on the Unbroken Sequence of Origins 
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In other words, standards development is process in which standards emerge, develop, branch out, combine and at certain points accumulate into next level standards.
An other conclusive thought on proliferating standards is that it is very very rare to see one standards fulfilling the needs or wants of all users at the same time. In other words, standards are, themselves, context-bound: they serve specific goals to specific interests of specific and different user groups.
Go back to Standards and Knowledge.