The Connectivity Standards Alliance brings together chip makers, device manufacturers and the large platform companies to define smart home and building standards. It was founded as the Zigbee Alliance and renamed when its scope widened beyond Zigbee to include Matter, the IP-based application layer backed by Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung among others.
For manufacturers the CSA is where device types and clusters are defined and where products are certified to carry the logo, which is what buyers rely on for interoperability. For readers of this site the key point is that the CSA owns the application layer while other bodies own the radios: Matter runs over Thread, Wi-Fi and Ethernet that are standardized elsewhere. The guide Matter explained covers how the pieces fit.
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