*Community Collective Land Stewardship Contributions to Sustainable Rural Development… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.104212*

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 communities to take legal recourse against the government's violation of its land law. The discourse on land tenure reform in the past two decades in Mozambique has dominantly focused on land-law formulation and institutional restructuring for implementation, but as witnessed by the Cubo community, there is a need to critically examine the effectiveness of how the government is enforcing its land tenure policy and legislation and find out why these enabling frameworks are being superficially implemented. Additionally, the new discourse on land tenure security should aim at consolidating processes of accountable governance, transparency, promoting the rule of law, and identifying sustainable mechanisms for mobilizing resources to enhance the government's capacity to effectively enforce its land law statutes.

Mozambique's civil society should: (a) proactively influence the government to prioritize implementation of existing laws and policies that already 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 advocacy for CBNRM 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 statues are adequately implemented and enforced; and (d) ensure that adoption of monoculture ventures, such as biofuel production is guided by objective assessments of their social and environmental impacts on the rural communities, so that such undertakings do not erode communities' natural and social capital assets, and denial them the opportunity to adopt collective land stewardship to pursue their locally rural development agenda.
