Patrick Bond (born 1961, Belfast, Northern Ireland) is professor of political economy at the University of the Witwatersrand Wits School of Governance. He was formerly associated with the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where he directed the Centre for Civil Society from 2004-2016. His research interests include political economy, environment, social policy, and geopolitics.
Bond was born in Northern Ireland and his family moved to Alabama the United States when he was seven, during the Civil Rights era. He was educated at Swarthmore College Department of Economics and the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania. He worked with several social justice agencies in Washington and Philadelphia during the 1980s. He then enrolled in a doctoral program, supervised by David Harvey, at the Johns Hopkins University Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering where he received his Ph.D. in 1993 ("Finance and uneven development in Zimbabwe").
He relocated to South Africa in 1990 and worked with Johannesburg NGOs including Planact, during the early and mid-1990s. From the end of the apartheid regime in 1994 until 2002, he was in Mandela's new South African government, authoring or editing more than a dozen policy papers including the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and the RDP White Paper. He also taught at the University of the Witwatersrand Graduate School of Public and Development Management from 1997-2004.