Understanding how to improve the relationships between science, policy and practice has been described as one of the critical challenges for sustainable development in the 21st century (UNEP, 2012; UNDESA, 2015). While conservation researchers have long sought to address the challenges of ‘science uptake' in policy and practice, exploration of how conservation research informs policy and practice is a reasonably nascent area of academic scholarship within the conservation community. This discussion paper draws on a variety of social science research fields to understand what this research has discovered and how that expertise can inform conservation activities. We explore different ‘mental models' of the relationships between science, policy and practice, and the solutions that correlate with each model. We discuss the strengths, weaknesses and limitations of these models in relation to how each can enable more effective conservation policy and practice.