First, do no harm? Dark logic models, social injustice, and the prevention of iatrogenic conservation outcomes

Abstract

In medicine and public health, the Hippocratic injunction to ‘first do no harm’ has inspired a longstanding tradition of research and practice seeking to mitigate iatrogenic (doctor or practitioner-created) risks. Aiming to anticipate and prevent iatrogenic outcomes, dark logic models challenge practitioners to explicitly consider mechanisms through which harms may arise from the implementation of proposed interventions. Placing recent literatures on conservation (in)justice in closer dialogue with debates about the utility of dark logic models in the health sciences, this article explores how such approaches may or may not be useful for avoiding negative social impacts or injustices in conservation governance. Particularly considering resurgent spatial ambitions in global biodiversity conservation – as evidenced by the Half Earth and 30 × 30 conservation targets – we suggest that dark logic models may ultimately prove to be a worthwhile component of conservation practice vis-à-vis the UN Convention on Biological Diversity's Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. In this context, dark logic models constitute an additional tool – which can be used in complementary fashion, alongside others – to better anticipate and prevent conservation harms, as well as to avoid further burdening those who have done the least to cause the biodiversity crisis with conservation's negative socioeconomic impacts.