Hamza Lenhard is the Recipient of the 2021 Francesco Kjellberg Award

The IPSA Committee on Organization, Procedures, and Awards (COPA) is pleased to announce its selection of Hamza Lenhard for the IPSA Francesco Kjellberg Award for Outstanding Papers Presented by New Scholars at the 2021 IPSA World Congress.

Dr. Hamza Lenhard’s paper – titled “Local Government Accountability, Oversight, and the Intervention Mechanism in South Africa” – assesses the impact of intervention mechanisms, including preventive measures, as part of the broader accountability and oversight setting.

The purpose of the Francesco Kjellberg Award is to encourage emerging scholars to present papers at the IPSA World Congress of Political Science. The selection was made through nominations by convenors and chairs at the 26th IPSA World Congress of Political Science. The recipient receives a US$1,000 prize to support their travel costs in connection with the 27th IPSA World Congress of Political Science (Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 2023), together with a complimentary two-year IPSA membership.

Hamza Lenhard's biography

Dr. Lenhard Hamza is an independent political scientist engaged in international development cooperation. As part of his fieldwork, he conducts research on and creates new ways of thinking about, decentralization and local governance in theory and practice. The paper titled “Local Government Accountability, Oversight, and the Intervention Mechanism in South Africa” was written while Lenhard was involved in the Governance & Development Unit at Rhodes University in South Africa. Lenhard earned his Ph.D. (Cum Laude) from the University of Vienna, Austria. In his doctoral thesis, he developed a unique and innovative way to show the benefits and perils of decentralization as a mechanism for solving internal ethnic conflicts, using Kosovo as his case study.