Prof Patrick Bond

Professor Patrick Bond is a Political Economist who directs the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) within the School of Built Environment and Development Studies at UKZN.

Bond – who is a public intellectual on a variety of critical issues - has long standing research interests in urban communities and with global justice movements in several countries.

His publishing has been spurred by the high-intensity production of knowledge that can be credited to South African, African and global civil society (often in conflict with the state and capital) and by his colleagues’ ability to carefully relate the often divergent worlds of academics and social change activists.

His research areas include water and sanitation, energy/electricity, climate change mitigation, World Social Forum strategy debates, social movement mobilizations, South African and Zimbabwean political economy, African economics, microcredit, health policy, global economic crisis, and the extraction of resources from the continent.

Bond authored/edited more than a dozen policy papers for the South African government from 1994-2002, including the Reconstruction and Development Programme and the RDP White Paper, and he taught at the University of the Witwatersrand Graduate School of Public and Development Management from 1997-2004.

He currently also serves as a visiting Professor at Gyeongsang National University Institute of Social Sciences, South Korea and in 2010-2011 he was a visiting scholar at the University of California/Berkeley in the United States.

Bond is an advisory board member of several international journals including: Antipode (Manchester University), Human Geography (Clark University), the International Journal of Health Services (Johns Hopkins School of Public Health), Review of African Political Economy (Sheffield University), and Journal of Human Development and Capabilities (Unesco, New York).

He also writes a bi-monthly ‘Eye on Society’ column in the Mercury morning newspaper in Durban.

Since coming to UKZN, his authored or edited books include: Durban’s Climate Gamble (University of South Africa Press); Politics of Climate Justice (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press); Zuma’s Own Goal (Africa World Press); Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society (UKZN Press); The Accumulation of Capital in Southern Africa (Rosa Luxemburg Foundation); Looting Africa (Zed Books); Talk Left, Walk Right (UKZN Press); Fanon’s Warning (Africa World Press); and Elite Transition (UKZN Press).

Recent articles include: Neoliberal Threats to North Africa, Review of African Political Economy; African economic claims and realities, Africa Insight; What is it to be radical, in neoliberal-nationalist South Africa? Review of Radical Political Economy; Carbon trading, new enclosures and socio-economic contestation; Antipode; From Copenhagen to Cancún to Durban: deckchair shifting on the climate Titanic, Capitalism Nature Socialism; and South Africa splinters, Review of African Political Economy.