Conservation development, also known as conservation design, is a controlled-growth land use development that adopts the principle for allowing limited sustainable development while protecting the area's natural environmental features in perpetuity, including preserving open space landscape and vista, protecting farmland or natural habitats for wildlife, and maintaining the character of rural communities. A conservation development is usually defined as a project that dedicates a minimum of 50 percent of the total development parcel as open space. The management and ownership of the land are often formed by the partnership between private land owners, land-use conservation organizations and local government. It is a growing trend in many parts of the country, particularly in the Western United States. In the Eastern United States, conservation design has been promoted by some state and local governments as a technique to help preserve water quality.

This type of planning has become more relevant as "land conversion for housing development is a leading cause of habitat loss and fragmentation". With a loss or fragmentation of a species' habitat, it results in the endangerment of a species and pushes them towards premature extinction. Land conversion also contributes to the reduction of agriculturally productive land, already shrinking due to climate change.

Conservation development differs from other land protection approaches by aiming to protect land and environmental resources on parcels slated for immediate development—to protect land here and now. In contrast, a green belt approach typically aims to protect land from future development, and in a region beyond areas currently slated for development. It seeks to offer a gradient between urban regions and open countryside, beyond what a line on a map—typically a highway—currently provides. This approach seeks to avoid the dichotomy of economic urbanism on one side of such a street while on the other lies completely protected woodlands and farm fields, devoid of inclusion in that economy. Addressing the theoretical illusion that humanity walled off is better-off, conservation development recognizes that design of how we live is far more important than we allot credit; that instead of walling off a problem we need to face that problem and drastically lower our impact on the sites where we live, and indeed raise the performance of our communities toward a level where such walls are no longer considered first response requirements.