Merging the conservation…

Merging the conservation authorities ought not to be done. The current system categorizing using watersheds makes sense - different watersheds have different problems and different solutions. It is helpful to draw the boundary lines using real-life ecosystems instead of political boundaries, so that organizations and people in the same watershed need to work together, and organizations and people who otherwise would follow the same strategy instead use strategies tailored to their own watershed.

Keeping the bureaucratic element small is also a valuable aspect of the current system, and one that a merge would trample. When the conservation authorities are smaller and greater in number, it allows for more transparency, efficiency, and trust. Different levels of the conservation authorities are more aware of each other and communicate more, allowing employees with boots on the ground to know personally the people at the top of the command chain and understand their vision, and allowing the people at the top of the command chain to know personally employees with boots on the ground and how well their strategies are working or not in practice. Making the conservation authorities larger eliminates this, and cuts off communication across the levels, such that the workers do not know, understand, or trust the decision-makers at the top, and the decision-makers at the top do not know, understand, or trust the workers. In a situation in which politicians and lobbyists attempt to influence conservation authority decisions against the health of ecosystems and for increases of profit, a greater number of smaller, more community-focused authorities are more difficult to corrupt than a lesser number of larger authorities that are necessarily more removed from local communities.

Merging the the conservation authorities would negatively impact the ecosystems they were built to conserve, the internal workings of the authorities themselves, and the relationship of the authorities with the communities they protecting nature for and on behalf of!