In pursuit of just elephant management: Making a case for legal reform

Abstract

Elephant management in South Africa remains entangled in legal, ethical, and ecological complexity. Despite the adoption of the 2008 Norms and Standards for Elephant Management and the 2016 Norms and Standards for the Management of Damage‐Causing Animals in South Africa, governance and management challenges persist across fenced reserves, open landscapes, and transboundary areas. The significance of elephants is considerable as they are ecological keystone species that shape biodiversity. They, however, also pose potential risks to ecosystems, property, and livelihoods, whilst being viewed as iconic animals based on their stature and sentience. Existing management frameworks rely on assumptions equating elephant impact with numbers or on narrow culprit animal approaches, producing interventions such as translocation, contraception, culling, fencing, or water manipulation that struggle to demonstrate a rational and proportionate connection to intended outcomes. Ethical framings, which frequently conflate welfare, wellbeing, and rights, further entrench paralysis by privileging perception‐based assessments over objective, ecological outcome‐driven measures. Drawing on constitutional principles of rationality and proportionality, as articulated in key Constitutional Court jurisprudence and given effect through the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act, here we evaluate the potential legal vulnerabilities of current approaches. We argue that management strategies grounded in magic numbers or rigid prohibitions risk being both ecologically ineffective and administratively unlawful. Interventions should define their purposes and objectives explicitly, focus on ecological mechanisms of elephant impact, and manage risks through duty of care, while creating opportunities for resilience and coexistence where feasible. We advocate reform of the current regime by shifting Norms and Standards into guiding principles supported by flexible, process‐based guidelines that emphasize ecological drivers, stakeholder co‐development, and lawful rationality and proportionality. Such reforms would ensure elephant management that is scientifically credible, ethically defensible, and constitutionally compliant.