During the past decade, especially in California, a new ‘'quiet revolution”; in land use management has been underway. This revolution has been marked by the use of sophisticated acquisition and resource restoration techniques to resolve the conflicts between development and environmental resources. To implement resource protection plans, existing governmental agencies and nonprofit land trusts have experimented with emerging and often controversial nonregulatory approaches to land use problems. In California, this experimentation was accompanied by the creation of new governmental agencies, set up specifically for these purposes. The State Coastal Conservancy, created in 1977, was the first in operation. This paper examines why the Conservancy was needed and what it has done.