We present a unified dynamical mean-field theory for stochastic self-organized critical models. We use a single site approximation, and we include the details of different models by using effective parameters and constraints. We identify the order parameter and the relevant scaling fields in order to describe the critical behavior in terms of the usual concepts of nonequilibrium lattice models with steady states. We point out the inconsistencies of previous mean-field approaches, which lead to different predictions. Numerical simulations confirm the validity of our results beyond mean-field theory.[ S0031-9007(97) The origin of scaling in Nature [1] has become in recent years a challenging problem in physics. Bak, Tang, and Wiesenfeld (BTW) [2] have proposed self-organized criticality (SOC) as a unifying theoretical framework to describe a vast class of driven systems that evolve "spontaneously" to a stationary state, characterized by power law distributions of dissipation events. Despite the insights SOC concepts have brought to a number of problems, an agreement on the precise definition of SOC has still not been reached, and the exact meaning of the word "spontaneous" is quite unclear. Originally, SOC was associated with the absence of tuning parameters, but it has been noted [3] that the driving rate acts as a tuning parameter in most, if not all, SOC models. This ambiguity has hindered the formulation of precise relations between SOC and other nonequilibrium critical phenomena [4,5].In this Letter we reformulate SOC in terms of typical concepts of nonequilibrium critical phenomena [5] by using the dynamical single site mean-field (MF) theory [6]. We provide a general scheme in which the details of different models are included via effective parameters and constraints. We mainly discuss sandpile models [2] with and without dissipation [7], but the formalism can be directly applied to other stochastic SOC models, such as the forest-fire model [8]. We find two independent critical parameters, i.e., relevant scaling fields, both with critical value equal to zero, and, just in this double limit, criticality is reached. We study the behavior of the order parameter and evaluate critical exponents. The results we obtain are in contrast with previous MF approaches [9,10]. This is due to a subtle inconsistency in the way critical parameters have been chosen in previous works. We show that some MF exponents are exact also in lowdimensional systems because of conservation laws. Our predictions are confirmed by numerical simulations of two-dimensional sandpile models.Sandpile models are cellular automata with an integer (or continuous) variable z i (energy) defined in a ddimensional lattice. At each time step an energy grain is added to a randomly chosen site, until the energy of a site reaches a threshold z c . When this happens the site relaxes ͑z i ! z i 2 z c ͒, and energy is transferred to the nearest neighbors ͑z j ! z j 1 y j ͒. For conservative models the transferred energy equals the energy lost by the relaxing...