IAS’ Africa Dialogue Series: Prof. Patrick Bond – “Africa and the Politics of Climate Justice”

This is an indispensable book for anyone who seeks to understand world leaders’ responses to climate change through the United Nations’ Conference of the Parties (COP). Politics of Climate Justice provides the vital background and theoretical context to what happened at the COPS in Kyoto, Copenhagen, Cancun, and Durban. It explores the favored strategies of key elites from the crisis ridden global and national power blocs, including South Africa, and finds them incapable of reconciling the threat to the planet with their economies’ addiction to fossil fuels. Finally, the book reveals sites of climate justice and interrogates the new movement’s approach.

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Patrick Bond (born 1961, Belfast, Northern Ireland) is professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where he has directed the Centre for Civil Society since 2004. His research interests include political economy, environment, social policy, and geopolitics. From 1994-2002, Patrick worked for the South African government, authoring or editing more than a dozen policy papers including the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and the RDP White Paper.[1] He has also taught at the University of the Witwatersrand Graduate School of Public and Development Management from 1997-2004. Bond gave the keynote lecture at the Leeds University Centre for African Studies (LUCAS) conference on ‘Democratization in Africa: Retrospective and Future Prospects’ at Leeds University in December 2009.[2]

Bond is an advisory board member of several international journals: Socialist Register (York University), International Journal of Health Services (Johns Hopkins School of Public Health), Historical Materialism, Journal of Peacebuilding and Development (American University), Studies in Political Economy (Carleton University), Capitalism Nature Socialism, Review of African Political Economy, and the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities (Unesco, New York). He worked with Johannesburg NGOs during the early and mid-1990s, and several social justice agencies in Washington and Philadelphia during the 1980s. He was educated at Swarthmore College Department of Economics, the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Johns Hopkins University Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering where he received his Ph.D. in 1993.[3]

Bond is also a member of the International Organization for a Participatory Society[4] of which he anticipates “immense learning and activist opportunities”.