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Collaboration with livestock producers has been a professed goal of federal land management agencies since the beginning of public lands grazing lease systems in the early 20th century. But it has not always been achieved: non-cooperation and even conflict have long marked relations between permittees, livestock associations and the two major agencies, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. And in recent decades, other government agencies with regulatory roles, such as the US Fish and Wildlife Service and state game and fish departments, have further complicated the practical challenges of managing rangelands collaboratively. This paper describes the contexts that have produced and constrained collaborative efforts and initiatives for rangeland management from the 1890s to the present, including the key roles played by science and scientists in defining conservation itself. The rise of collaborative conservation since the 1990s has required overcoming the obsession with stocking rates that was enshrined in public rangeland administration and research roughly a century ago.