Naming It Is Not Enough: An Orienting Map for Understanding Conservation's Entanglement With Power

Power is frequently acknowledged in conservation as a limiting factor, something to be cited, problematized, or managed, less frequently is it engaged with as a lived, situated, and multidimensional force. This primer responds to a recurring issue in conservation: The tendency to name power without examining how we, as re-searchers, policy-makers, and practitioners, are entangled in its production and reproduction. Conservation is not neutral; it is interventionist. As such, it demands rigorous reflection on how our assumptions about the world, about who or what can act, change, or matter, shape the problems we see and the solutions we pursue. This paper introduces a reflexive framework that combines three onto-epistemological frames (objectivist, constructivist, and relational) with six dimensions of power (material, structural, discursive, symbolic, networked, and relational), each linked to differing assumptions of agency. It is intentionally reductive, reflecting how conservation often treats power as separable and locatable, enabling interventions to be rationalized and evaluated. A cross-cutting matrix enables users to trace how their own position shapes what they see, do, and make possible in conservation contexts; without such conscious engagement, even well-intended actions risk entrenching the inequalities and dynamics they aim to undo.