Authoritarian regimes in the Middle East are oft-regarded as suppressive of the possibility for public deliberation, and especially of women’s participation in such discussions. In recent years, however, scholars have endeavored to challenge the narrative of such contexts as necessarily quelling spaces for civil expression and have therefore illustrated the existence of associational life within such states. As a result, the concept of state feminism has been variably applied by scholars to understand the alliances between national policy entities and female activists, an analytic move that is particularly evident in research concerning the circulation of empowerment discourses within authoritarian, postcolonial environments. Yet that formulation disregards the complex engagements between civil society institutions – namely, non-government women’s organizations – and emergent forms of transnational governance. In response, this paper examines how such associations interact with international development interventions, and suggests that development feminism provides a new framework through which those entanglements and their effects can be critically analyzed. Drawing upon thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork undertaken between September 2018 and December 2019 in Amman, Jordan with three non-governmental women’s organizations located in the capital’s urban core, this paper offers a discussion of how the female members of those associations act within the third-sector created by international donor funding, and the implications of those practices on the shape of women’s organizational activism in Jordan. That is, this paper explores the implications of non-governmental women’s organizations’ adaptations to and envelopment within international development machineries. This paper argues that despite its professionalized equivocality, the possibility manifested in the logics of development constitutes a powerful imaginary for civil society, one that has become central to the operation of non-governmental women’s organizations in postcolonial spaces. In doing so, this paper moves away from discussions of the national state’s symbolic commitments to ‘women’s interests’ to center the relationships between non-governmental women’s organizations and international development institutions in the arrangement of civil society. [314 / 400]