We’ve all had duds. We’ve worked on projects far longer than we would have liked to and failed. We’ve agonised over missteps. We’ve learned from roadblocks — sometimes we’ve not. Yet it’s the successes we love talking about. Conservation is no different.

“‘Doing’ conservation often means grappling with very wicked problems, often intractable and there are no easy pat solutions — the way many success stories are often told makes it sound very easy and non-controversial and simplistic,” Aparajita Datta, a conservation scientist at the Nature Conservation Foundation based in Mysore, India, told Mongabay. “In fact, it is quite dangerous to propagate that notion among people. It can lead to strong disillusionment in the real world.”

But it is the “successes” in conservation projects that usually make it into scientific papers and reports. Analysis of failures is uncommon in the peer-reviewed conservation literature, new research says, even though lessons from failures are as valuable as those from successes when trying to understand what works and what doesn’t in conservation.

This is totally unsurprising, David Wilkie, director of conservation measures for the Wildlife Conservation Society, who was not involved in the study, told Mongabay. “We have long argued for evidence-based decisions making,” he said, “but that has almost exclusively, as the paper confirms, been framed in terms of positive evidence, or success stories, with little or no attempt to look at negative evidence, or failures or unexpected and undesired outcomes.”

Lead author Allison Catalano’s quest to understand how people talk about failure in conservation began where many research questions do: with a laborious literature review.

She searched for peer-reviewed scientific papers reporting on the social aspects of why conservation projects succeed or fail, and found more than 220 articles discussing project successes. Only 59 articles analysed failures, that is, tried to evaluate why the goals of a project hadn’t been met.

Read the full article about failure in conservation projects by Shreya Dasgupta at Eco-business.