**1. Introduction**

Rural development can be defined as a process that seeks social change and sustainable economic development for the rural community's ongoing progress. The goal is to improve the rural people's livelihoods and preserve the environment at the local level, where changes can be seen and felt in a more immediate manner, guarantee intergenerational equity, and ensure that the current generation must not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their material needs and enjoy a healthy environment [1]. In most African rural areas, agriculture (crop and livestock production) is often the dominant, and sometimes the exclusive economic sector that is considered as the driver of rural development. However, dependence on agriculture as the mainstay for livelihoods and rural development is severely constrained in the semi-arid areas, where soils are poor, and rainfall is insufficient. Consequently, rural people skewedly depend on natural resources (forests, wildlife, fish, grazing land, etc.) which are openly accessed by users, without individual or collective commitment to manage or regulate the use, which often leads to depletion, and environmental degradation.

To address this tragedy of the commons, the Cubo community in Massingir District, Mozambique, guided by the Land Law of 1997, chapter 3, Article 9 and Decree 66 of 1998 secured land rights to collectively manage and commit it to biodiversity conservation through the establishment of a Community Conservancy. The Conservancy was established as a mechanism through which the communities could partner with the private sector, and directly participate in the wildlife economy, through ecotourism marketing, selling of live wild animals, production of game meat to supply in the ever-growing venison market in Mozambique, and other associated benefits, such as employment in fencing and management of the Conservancy.

This collective community stewardship of land would have transformed local land from an open accessed commodity into a collectively managed resource for community prosperity. Under this arrangement, community members who have relationships with the land were expected to practice democratic decision making, and ensure permanent community benefits for generations. This was the basis through which communities themselves would have contributed to sustainable rural development in the Massingir District, Mozambique. This dream was however not realized due to competing land uses, and Mozambique's government's inability to effectively implement the statutes of the land law and this exemplifies one of the challenges of using collective land stewardship as a mechanism for promoting sustainable rural development in Africa.

This chapter highlights the fragility of community collective land stewardship as a tool for enabling sustainable rural development and addressing the problem of the tragedy of the commons. It elucidates the community's socioeconomic status, and its rationalization to integrate biodiversity management and sustainable use of wildlife into its land-use options; outlines the process the community had followed in

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

acquiring land tenure security and its governance; highlights possible reasons for the Mozambique government's imposition of agrofuel production on a secured communal land, and provides lessons on Mozambique's non-committal to its own land law. Overall, this chapter exemplifies one of the challenges faced in integrating local communities in biodiversity conservation and sustainable rural development in Africa where power and money could easily trump laws and rules.
