In this age of complicated, transboundary environmental challenges, the conservation community is increasingly taking a landscape-level approach to natural resource conservation. This approach, collaborative landscape conservation (CLC), encourages coordinating conservation across entire ecosystems, and employs a transjurisdictional, partnership-based model of planning and management implementation. Despite its potential advantages, the CLC model faces obstacles, including how to ensure transboundary conservation goals can be achieved through local management actions. This dissertation seeks to articulate characteristics of the CLC planning model, the general processes through which this model operates, and how CLC initiatives can avoid planning-implementation gaps. It draws on insights from 155 semi-structured interviews with CLC initiative coordinators, development team participants formally involved in CLC planning, and potential end-users of CLC planning products. My findings highlight the potential contributions of local stakeholder participation and social data integration to mitigating planning-implementation gaps. I present a tentative model of cross-level coordination that might facilitate resource conservation across complex social-ecological landscapes and describe factors contributing to (1) horizontal and vertical collaboration in CLC and (2) the capacity of a CLC initiative to generate conservation goals and planning-support tools likely to be used in local management planning. I present a model of best practices for facilitating end-user participation in CLC planning and promoting adoption of CLC planning products. Results of my research indicate that local stakeholder participation and consideration of the human dimensions of landscapes targeted for conservation can provide a range of benefits, including (1) helping ensure landscape conservation goals are feasible, (2) CLC planning products are useful, usable, and trustworthy, and (3) local stakeholders are aware of landscape conservation initiatives and resources generated by these initiatives. Encouraging a social-ecological approach to CLC planning may require organizational and cultural shifts heightening valuation of local and social considerations in conservation planning, investments of time to understand local socio-political, cultural, and economic conditions, and investments of resources to facilitate effective participation opportunities.