Conservation research and practice are increasingly engaging with people anddrawing on social sciences to improve environmental governance. In doing so,conservation engages with power in many ways, often implicitly. Conservationscientists and practitioners exercise power when dealing with species, peopleand the environment, and increasingly they are trying to address power rela-tions to ensure effective conservation outcomes (guiding decision-making,understanding conflict, ensuring just policy and management outcomes). How-ever, engagement with power in conservation is often limited or misguided. Toaddress challenges associated with power in conservation, we introduce thefour dominant approaches to analyzing power to conservation scientists andpractitioners who are less familiar with social theories of power. These includeactor-centered, institutional, structural, and, discursive/governmental power.To complement these more common framings of power, we also discuss fur-ther approaches, notably non-human and Indigenous perspectives. We illus-trate how power operates at different scales and in different contexts, andprovide six guiding principles for better consideration of power in conservation research and practice. These include: (1) considering scales and spaces indecision-making, (2) clarifying underlying values and assumptions of actions,(3) recognizing conflicts as manifestations of power dynamics, (4) analyzingwho wins and loses in conservation, (5) accounting for power relations in par-ticipatory schemes, and, (6) assessing the right to intervene and the conse-quences of interventions. We hope that a deeper engagement with socialtheories of power can make conservation and environmental managementmore effective and just while also improving transdisciplinary research and practice.