Challenges to legitimate governance in post-revolution Tunisia
The power to craft Tunisia's post–Ben Ali government has been vested in the National Constituent Assembly, which was elected on 23 October 2011. The constituent assembly has sovereign authority to draft a new constitution and govern Tunisia until its replacement is elected. The first challenge confronting the constituent assembly will be to build legitimacy for itself and the transitional government that it will appoint. This paper places the constituent assembly in the context of post-revolution politics and summarises its role, responsibilities, and structure. The paper also anticipates key challenges to the constituent assembly's legitimacy as it works to meet the high expectations of Tunisians and the rest of the world.
Creating the birth certificate of a new South Africa: constitution making after apartheid
South Africa’s first democratic constitution came into effect on February 4, 1997, bringing to a close a long series of events that defined the country’s astonishing transition from oppressive minority rule and violent civil conflict to nonracial democracy. This constitution—the result of negotiations among political enemies at war not long before they joined together to chart the country’s future—is both the symbol of South Africa’s seemingly miraculous transformation and the anchor of its new order. Albie Sachs, a justice of South Africa’s first constitutional court, eloquently summarized the immensity of the challenge facing the country’s constitution makers in looking back at the start of preliminary talks in 1990:
Data Driven Policy: The Case for Certification Research
This article describes the program of research being implemented to investigate the outcomes of certification in the U.S. and Canadian workforce and its relevance to the goal of providing policy makers with pragmatic, action-oriented recommendations. Such recommendations encompass policy issues of workforce production, regulation, distribution, financing, and oversight of credentialing organizations. Few studies exist to substantiate the association between certification credentialing and practice outcomes, thereby leaving policy makers, consumers, and nurses in a vacuum when pushed to protect the public through the credentialing vehicles. The Nursing Credentialing Research Coalition (NCRC) has embarked on a research program that will reveal the relationship between certification and its influence on a nurse’s personal, professional, and practice characteristics as well as those judged by consumers and employers. Selected findings and implications for policy are described. Certified nurses’ reports of early interventions for complications are important quality measures for policy.