Community Collective Land Stewardship Contributions to Sustainable Rural Development: Lessons from Cubo, Mozambique

Abstract

This chapter offers lessons on the ineffectiveness of community collective land stewardship as an enabling tool for local communities in semi-arid Africa to adopt biodiversity conservation to diversify their income and contribute to sustainable local-level rural development. While collective community stewardship of land could have transformed local land from an open accessed commodity into a collectively managed resource for community prosperity, and ensuring democratic decision-making, and permanent community benefits for generations, the Mozambique government’s inability to effectively implement the statutes of its land law thwarted the Cubo community’s dream to contribute to local sustainable development, due to competing land use. In the case of Mozambique, a number of factors contributed to the community’s loss of its land to alternative use/agrofuel production, including the government’s inadequate political will to enforce the land law’s statutes; ineffective civil society to protect communities against the booming private interest in land for investment in agro-based businesses; blind loyalty of community members to their traditional leaders who are susceptible to corruption and manipulation by the private sector; illiteracy among community members, which renders them incapable of fully understanding their legal rights to land; and lack of financial capacity for the community to take legal recourse against the government’s violation of its land law. We recommend that the new discourse on land tenure reform in Mozambique should: critically examine the effectiveness of how the government is enforcing its land tenure legislation; consolidate processes of accountable governance, transparency, and promotion of the rule of law. Additionally, Mozambique’s civil society should: (a) proactively influence the government to prioritize implementation of existing laws and policies that promote devolved natural resources management to the local communities, and work on harmonizing cross-sectoral policies and legislation that improve management effectiveness of land and natural resources; (b) strongly advocate for implementation of Community-based Natural Resources Management models that strengthen locally accountable institutions for natural resource management and use—enabling local communities to protect their land and associated resources against foreign acquisitions; (c) improve transparency and effectiveness in enforcing the land law—to ensure that all its statutes are adequately implemented and enforced. The Cubo community’s experience of losing its collectively secured land to alternative uses exemplifies one of the challenges faced in integrating local communities in biodiversity conservation and rural development programs in southern Africa, wherein some situations, power and money could easily trump laws and rules.