Professor Emeritus
School of Epidemiology and Public Health
Ronald Labonté PhD
Bio
Ronald Labonté is Professor Emeritus and former Distinguished Research Chair in Globalization and Health Equity in the School of Public Health and Epidemiology, University of Ottawa. His early public health work focused on health promotion, community empowerment, and social determinants of health, where much of his early writing, analyses, and practice models contributed to the foundational 1986 Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion. By the mid-1990s, while consulting with public health groups in dozens of countries in Europe, the Americas, and the Antipodes, he noted health workers’ ubiquitous concerns with cutbacks and retrenchments, drawing his attention to what, at global scale, might be driving so many nation states in a disequalizing direction. 1994 marked the birth of the World Trade Organization, and the instantiation of ‘structural adjustment programs’ at both the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Since then, and for the past 50 years, his research, teaching, and advocacy work has attempted to unpack the health equity impacts of diverse globalization processes, with studies covering such topics as health worker migration; medical tourism; global health diplomacy; trade, political economy and tobacco control; trade and food security; health impact assessments of trade and investment treaties; comprehensive primary health care reforms; the social determinants/determination of health equity; health and foreign policy; and global governance of infectious disease and antimicrobial resistance. He chaired the Globalization Knowledge Network for the World Health Organization’s Commission on the Social Determinants of Health (2005-2008) and subsequent UK and European reviews.
He has authored or edited 13 books, including Health Equity in a Globalizing Era (Oxford University Press), awarded Book of the Year by the British Medical Association in 2021 and a summary of his global health equity studies; and most recently New Directions in Critical Public Health (Routledge, 2026). He is Editor Emeritus and former Editor-in-Chief of the BMC journal, Globalization and Health, has published over 400 scientific papers, and is active with the People’s Health Movement (PHM). A frequent contributor to its flagship publication Global Health Watch, he is co-editor of its 6th (Global Health Watch 6: In the shadow of the pandemic, 2022) and 7th (Global Health Watch 7: Mobilizing for social justice, 2025) editions.
Since retiring from full-time academic work he has spent time returning to a pastime of his youth: art, at this point largely confined to dry media (pencil, charcoal) and some acrylics. For those similarly drawn to aesthetic pursuits, a separate page of his drawings and paintings is included on this site.
