During the last decades, marketization and management trends have become characteristic features in the field of international development cooperation. Economic ideals of efficiency and transparency have paved the way for the introduction of competitive principles in donor funding procedures, the integration of standardized models for constructing development interventions (e.g. LFA and RBM) and an increased focus on auditing, evaluation and reporting (e.g. Thörn, 2016; Follér, 2013; Mueller-Hirth, 2012). Furthermore, different services in the development aid sector are increasingly being outsourced to consultants who use the possibilities of call-offs by donors and other stakeholders. This paper, which is a snapshot of an ongoing PhD thesis, aims to explore the possible conflicts between these economic ideals of efficiency, and the emancipatory intentions in the development aid sector, especially from the perspective of Swedish CSOs working with rights-based approaches in various fields. This paper aims to present some tentative analyses of how the above mentioned practices constitute a form of governing aiming to incorporate CSOs in a neoliberal governmentality (cf. Dean, 2010; Miller & Rose, 2008), constructing these organizations “according to a specific image of the economic” (Brown, 2015, p. 10). With an intention of conducting an initial analysis of interviews and documents, collected from Swedish CSOs, the paper uses analytical concepts from governmentality theory to study political rationalities and technologies of governing (Dean, 2010). The idea here is to show how governing takes place “at a distance” with effects on how emancipatory work is enacted. However, the intention is not only to illuminate rationalities and technologies but also how these are contested through practices of politics (Li, 2007). The paper also touches upon the political consequences of the aid sector, and especially CSOs, being mobilized as vehicles for the reproduction of market and management rationalities in a post political society (cf. Mouffe, 2008; 2016).