5. Conclusion
The importance of patrons in determining which species are targeted in fishing in Zanzibar has been shown in a recent study (Thyresson et al., 2013). For patrons to become constructively involved in natural resource management for long-term sustainability, the apparent short-termism in this type of decision-making needs to be addressed. On Zanzibar, patrons play a strong and, in some case, replaceable role in natural resource exploitation but a small and variable role in securing the level of clients' livelihoods. We do not yet understand under which circumstances patrons are dispensable, but we can assume that one or multiple actors must fulfill the same or more of the social security functions we have outlined in this paper. Nonetheless, the impacts of patroneclient relations on socialeecological dynamics are considerable, so that we need to develop strategies to achieve long-term sustainability that explicitly include the sustainability-enhancing potentials of patroneclient relations, or at least the functions that they entail. Rising prices of fish, mainly as a result of growing tourism, buffer the feedback from the environment to the social system and so
short-termism continues. Patrons carry the environmentally under-informed feedback from the market to the producer realm. They act as both a source of destruction and of renewal for many components of the Zanzibari coastal socialeecological system, as outlined here. Although patroneclient relationships are not the lynchpin of livelihood security in the sites studied, they remain a valuable source of income and food security. There is a need to weaken the exploitative aspects we have here emphasized, but options for affecting and using the leverage (roomfor maneuver) of patrons in socialeecological dynamics are only just being identified. Acknowledgmen