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Resilience thinking has undergone profound theoretical developments in recent decades, moving to characterize resilience as a socio‐natural process that requires constant negotiation between a range of actors and institutions. Fundamental to this understanding has been a growing acknowledgment of the role of power in shaping resilience capacities and politics across cultural and geographic contexts. This review article draws on a critical content analysis, applied to a systematic review of recent resilience literature to examine how scholarship has embraced nuanced conceptualizations of how power operates in resilience efforts, to move away from framings that risk reinforcing patterns of marginalization. Advancing a framework inspired by feminist theory and feminist political ecology, we analyze how recent work has presented, documented, and conceptualized how resilience intersects with patterns of inequity. In doing so, we illuminate the importance of knowledge, scale, and subject making in understanding the complex ways in which power and resilience become interlinked. We illustrate how overlooking such complexity may have serious consequences for how socio‐natural challenges and solutions are framed in resilience scholarship and, in turn, how resilience is planned and enacted in practice. Finally, we highlight how recent scholarship is advancing the understandings necessary to make sense of the shifting, contested, and power‐laden nature of resilience. Paying attention to, and building on, such complexity will allow scholarly work to illuminate the ways in which resilience is negotiated within inequitable processes and to address the marginalization of those continuing to bear the brunt of the climate crisis. This article is categorized under: Climate and Development > Social Justice and the Politics of Development

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Human geographers and other critical scholars have long emphasised the disproportionate effects of climate change on individuals and populations already socially and economically marginalised. Yet, scholarship and practice continue to work with inadequate conceptualisations of how these inequalities are perpetuated. In this critical examination, we illustrate that the feminist literature on intersectional subjectivities provides pertinent insights into transformational, emancipatory futures for disenfranchised individuals and groups who bear the brunt of the climate crisis. By focusing on how power dynamics produce and sustain multidimensional inequalities, across cultural and geographic contexts, and linking this with understandings of subject making, we draw attention to the many ways pervasive inequalities are challenged and (re)negotiated in the everyday of human–environment relations. As part of this line of inquiry, we further demonstrate how a focus on intersectional subjectivities helps to expose and overcome lingering ethical dilemmas and injustices within transformation efforts, with emphasis on the roles researchers and practitioners can play in nourishing emancipatory spaces. Progress in this space is crucial to critically examine and establish more transformative adaptation trajectories that foreground dignified lives in an increasingly unequal world.