(Panel 7) Democratising Intermediaries: How Civil Society Organisations Construct Representative Claims in Regulatory Governance

Regulatory governance scholarship has long attributed a legitimating function to civil society organisations (CSOs). Braithwaite and Drahos's (2000) influential account argues that a "strong civil society" protects against market domination and legitimates regulatory authority through participation in consultation and oversight processes. Yet this theoretical assumption rests on largely unexamined foundations: that CSOs possess meaningful representative connections with the constituents they claim to speak for, and that their participation in governance spaces translates into democratic legitimation. This paper interrogates these assumptions through empirical examination of how CSOs construct and deploy representative claims within regulatory governance systems. Drawing on Saward's (2010) constructivist theory of representative claims, the paper analyses how CSOs, operating as beneficiary intermediaries, navigate the representative relationship between themselves (as claim-makers), the constituents they purport to represent (as subjects), and the governance audiences they address. This framework reveals representation not as a static attribute but as an ongoing performative practice requiring continuous construction and acceptance. When applied to regulatory governance contexts, this perspective exposes significant variation in how CSOs substantiate their claims to speak for affected populations. The paper presents findings from a comparative study of Australian disability and aged care welfare sectors, analysing 216 submissions from 104 CSOs to two Royal Commissions, complemented by 35 interviews with CSO leaders. The analysis reveals that many CSOs make representative claims without demonstrable constituent engagement, while others invest substantially in what I term "dialogic representation", understood as sustained practices that either enable constituents to express choices or develop their capacity for civic engagement (Han & Kim 2022). These divergent approaches produce markedly different representative claims: some CSOs construct constituents as passive beneficiaries requiring protection, while others position them as rights-holders demanding systemic transformation. The empirical findings expose a central paradox: while governance infrastructures embed normative expectations about CSO legitimation roles, few institutional incentives exist for authentic constituent engagement. This creates conditions where the performance of representation may substitute for its substance, potentially undermining the democratic legitimation that regulatory governance theory attributes to civil society participation. The paper advances the concept of "democratising intermediaries" to theorise CSOs' distinctive position within regulatory regimes. Extending Abbott, Levi-Faur and Snidal's (2017) regulatory intermediary framework, this conceptualisation distinguishes beneficiary intermediation from target-aligned or expert intermediation, highlighting how CSOs must simultaneously maintain legitimacy with marginalised constituents and powerful regulatory actors. The concept foregrounds the relational work required for authentic representation, work that current governance arrangements neither consistently require nor reward. This analysis contributes to regulatory governance scholarship by providing empirical grounding for theoretical assumptions about civil society's legitimating role (Beetham 1991), while revealing the conditions under which stakeholder participation genuinely democratises regulatory governance versus merely performing democratic inclusion.