Tackling the Elephant in the Room: Sustainability Under Strain

Tulsi Jayakumar

Product #:W49384

Supplier:Ivey

Discipline:Economics & Public Policy, Sustainability

Setting:Malawi, 2025

Details:Case (PDF) • 16 pages • 2026-06-26

Subjects:

Geography:

Malawi Africa

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$9.71

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In November 2025, the Director of Malawi's Department of National Parks and Wildlife stood along the Malawi–Zambia border, reflecting on one of Africa's most ambitious conservation undertakings. Three years earlier, he had overseen the translocation of 263 elephants from Liwonde National Park to Kasungu National Park in a landmark initiative funded by the International Fund for Animal Welfare and implemented in partnership with African Parks and the Government of Malawi. The project tripled Kasungu's elephant population, strengthened Malawi's conservation credentials, and enhanced its tourism prospects. Yet sustaining those gains required confronting the human cost of success. Crop destruction, fatalities, retaliatory elephant killings, a class-action lawsuit, and accusations of "conservation imperialism" had eroded trust among villagers, park authorities, and conservation partners. Within 90 days, the director had to chart a path forward that safeguarded both communities and biodiversity.

Learning Objectives

This case is suited to undergraduate, graduate, and executive-level courses or modules in Sustainability Strategy, Environmental Governance, ESG, Stakeholder Management, Development Economics, or Public Policy in emerging and low-income economies. It is best taught mid-course, after students have been introduced to stakeholder theory, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the concept of trade-offs in resource-constrained settings. The decision-focused structure supports a 90-minute discussion and pairs well with material on biodiversity finance, climate justice, and the political economy of conservation. The case moves students beyond generic SDG framing toward structured analysis of SDG interactions—drawing on Le Blanc's (2015) network view and Nilsson et al.'s (2018) interaction typology—to examine how biodiversity protection (SDG 15) collides with poverty (SDG 1), hunger (SDG 2), water (SDG 6), energy (SDG 7), and economic growth (SDG 8). It serves as a bridge between "win–win" sustainability narratives and the systemic trade-offs that arise when ecological restoration and human development goals conflict. After working through the case and assignment questions, students will be able to do the following:

Analyze the human landscape, and sources of stakeholder conflicts and legitimacy breakdown in contexts of human-animal conflict, such as in Kasungu National Park
Assess competing SDG objectives in the context of the human-elephant conflict
Evaluate the strategic options available to Kumchedwa in terms of their ecological, political, financial, and ethical trade-offs
Design a governance or policy intervention that balances biodiversity protection with human safety in low-income settings.