This thesis addresses environmental governance at the regional level, specifically issuesand challenges surrounding private land conservation in the United States. The history of the land trust movement in the United States is outlined and significant attention is given to unpacking the conceptual dimensions of the “region” across several academic literatures. The relationship between regional environmental governance and private land conservation is examined using a social relational approach in a bioregional context. This examination is linked to social networks through the bioregional notion of the “socialshed”. This novel framework is applied to a social network analysis of private land conservation actors in Western North Carolina. The social network analysis is a pilot study, undertaken with the objectives of “getting a lay of the land” in terms of network topography and teasing out information that might help the networks and their actors in pursuit of meeting conservation goals and rising to the challenges of conservation in the 21st century.