Policies for Solutions to New Challenges Facing Traditional Conservation Practices.

Protecting soil, water, and wildlife resources on agricultural lands and managing the land to provide ecosystem services that sustain human communities requires not just conservation practices but also the incentives and/or reasons for users to adopt the practices that lead to solutions.  Policy at various governmental and geographic levels of implementation serves to support the research that produces the practices, the science to identify where and how these practices can best be used, and the measures to induce users to adopt.  Policy drives the development and maintenance of the informational infrastructure for sustainable systems and, importantly, the signaling of what does and does not work.  Crafting effective policy in a multidimensional framework of changing market, social, environmental and budgetary conditions is as important as the science itself. This presentation will identify and discuss these new challenges, as well as those that have yet to be addressed, and will propose a framework for identifying and developing new policy given the opportunities presented with a new Farm Bill.  In particular, it will explain how institutional barriers can thwart the best intentions regarding how science is used or reflected in policy and suggest alternative paths for avoiding and overcoming these problems. Case examples will be presented and discussed.