New school Thais: a military establishment voted out

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Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Ora Ogunbiyi.

And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

America hands out eye-watering amounts of money for international development each year. But quite a bit of it doesn't look like money well spent. We look into suggestions that the country's main aid agency is inefficient and hidebound.

And scientists reckon that there are more than 2 million species of animals in the oceans. So far, they've catalogued only a tenth that amount. Our correspondent reveals a new mission to spot 100,000 more species in the next decade.

But first, over the weekend, a historic number of Thai citizens voted in a highly anticipated general election. For decades, politics in Thailand has been two-sided. —a battle between the zealous royalists on one hand, and on the other, supporters of Thaksin Shinawatra, a populist tycoon turned political leader. But the election results suggest that this struggle may now be dramatically reshaped.

A stunning, unexpected election result in Thailand, led by 42-year-old Pita Limchanranrat.

A reformist party known known as Move Forward won the most seats as young liberal Thais showed up in their droves to vote against the establishment. Yesterday, its leader, Pita Limjaroenrat, said that he should now take charge of the country.

I am ready to be the prime minister for all, whether you agree with me or you disagree with me.

The incumbent prime minister, Prayut Chan-o-cha, who seized power in a military coup 9 years ago, came third in the vote, trailing Pheu Thai, the country's main opposition party. Transformative change is within sight, but actually forming a new government is the hard part.

Even Move Forward seems to be shocked by how well they've done. They did not expect to win the number of seats that they have won.

Su Lin Wong is The Economist's Southeast Asia correspondent.

But they also were very quick to adapt to the good news from their perspective. And by Monday evening, there was a street party around Bangkok's Democracy Monument. People were incredibly buoyant after what has been a pretty grim past decade. Sunday's election also saw historic voter turnout, the highest on record of over 75% of eligible Thais who could vote. It was really very much a wholesale rejection of the status quo.

So, Lynn, paint a bit of a picture for us. Who are the winners and the losers here?

Broadly speaking, the winners are the pro-democracy camp and the losers are the military establishment. The biggest winner in the pro-democracy camp is Move Forward, which was founded by young liberal Thais in 2018 and has really taken off over the past few years. The other main democracy party, Pheu Thai, was expected to win this election, but they actually came in second. And combined, Move Forward and Pheu Thai, the two main opposition parties, have won 292 seats in the 500-seat assembly. Now, on the other side are the two main pro-military parties, including the United Thai Nation Party of the prime minister, Prayuth Chan-o-cha, which only won 76 seats. So Move Forward's leader, Mr. Pita, has proposed forming a coalition government of 6 parties, including Pheu Thai. And they've specifically said that the coalition would exclude any party that supported the military government previously. And in total, that means that this proposed coalition would control 309 of the 500 seats in the lower house.

Okay, when we spoke to you last week, you mentioned how the political influence of the establishment runs really deep in Thailand. How does that come into play here, especially when you've got a third party trying to build a coalition?

Yeah, so Thailand has a very unusual political system in a way, and despite the political mandate that the democracy camp has just won, the fact that they have the most seats in the lower house does not guarantee that Move Forward will get to choose who becomes the next prime minister. And the reason for this is because the military establishment has very much rigged the system in its favor. And under the constitution that the then-ruling junta forced through in 2016, the Senate has an outsized role in appointing the prime minister. So the next few weeks are going to be very, very focused on what these 250 appointed Senators choose to do. Now, to get around this rigged system, Mr. Pita would actually need 376 out of the 500 seats in the lower house, which he currently does not have. And making matters harder, the Electoral Commission and the Anti-Corruption Commission are stacked with army loyalists. That having been said, Mr. Pita still seems confident that he can beat this system and that the will of the people should be listened to. As he made clear yesterday.

With the consensus that came out of the election, it will be quite a hefty price to pay for someone who is thinking of abolishing the election results or forming a minority government. It's probably far-fetched from now, and I think the people of Thailand would not allow that to happen.

And what do you think? Is he right to be confident?

It's very hard to say. So On the one hand, many Thais have said to me that they're attracted to his party because it appears much more principled than other parties. And that principled approach seems to be continuing post-election. And the Move Forward Party has been very, very clear that it's incredibly important that the will of the Thai people be respected. But on the other hand, when I spoke to him on his campaign trail, he did say he was worried about all kinds of dirty tricks and election rigging.

I mean, I'm worried about gerrymandering. I'm worried about not reporting the results right away, you know, for you to double-check the count. There's like this little details. The devil is in the details. So these little details that, you know, will go against the will of the people.

The establishment might also try to unseat him by more underhanded means. This has happened before. So as I mentioned, Move Forward was founded in 2018. And promptly won the third largest number of seats in the election the following year. But the Thai establishment was horrified by how well they had done and how popular they were, especially among young Thais. And so it moved to charge its then leader with lèse-majesté, which is the crime of offending a monarch, and banned him from politics for 10 years and disbanded the party. Last week, we saw possible groundwork being laid for a similar ploy. A pro-military candidate filed a complaint with Thailand's electoral and anti-corruption commissions, alleging that Mr. Pita had failed to adequately declare his ownership of a particular stock. The Move Forward leader denies any wrongdoing. So what now?

What does this all mean for Thailand?

It's very hard to predict what might happen over the next few weeks. But as I mentioned on the show last week, Move Forward campaigned on a promise to reform the monarchy and armed forces. Two institutions that have long dominated Thailand. And this win promises to redefine Thai politics as a fight between a growing majority who want a fully democratic country where the power of the monarchy and the military is restrained, and a dwindling royalist minority. The problem is that the army establishment backed by the monarchy is not going to concede its defeat easily. So it may take weeks before a new government is declared. and it may take even longer for Thais to obtain the vibrant democracy that they voted for. But no matter what, this election does really appear to be a turning point. And for the first time in a long time, Thais seem to have reason to feel more hopeful about their country's future.

Sulin, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thanks so much for having me, Aurey.

America is the world's largest provider of foreign assistance. The corner of the government that is tasked with splashing that cash is the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. It committed a whopping $32 billion last year. Obviously, that money does a power of good for poor people around the world. But it's also important for America from a purely PR perspective. Trouble is, USAID's work doesn't always make America look all that good.

There's lots and lots of critics in the aid industry that say that USAID puts bureaucratic processes way before it puts actually creating progress.

Avantika Chilcoti is an international correspondent for The Economist.

So for example, there was a study published in 2019 that looked at 3 years of USAID spending, and it found that over 40% of USAID's awards achieved about half the results they intended to.

And why is that then? Why such poor results?

The root of the inefficiency is basically the way the agency is set up. USAID, like many government aid agencies, doesn't run projects itself. USAID staff designs projects, and then it's more like a procurement agency, to be honest. They hand big sums of money to international organizations, nonprofit groups, UN agencies, private sector contractors, and it's these intermediaries that identify organizations on the ground around the world doing good work and hand that money out. USAID gets involved monitoring them and so on. But, you know, there's a lot of criticism in particular about how much of the agency's money goes to these big American private sector consultancies in the D.C. Beltway area. They're called the Beltway Bandits.

So you say that the criticism here is that there's bureaucratic process before progress. What's wrong with the process?

If you get funding from the American government, you have to fill out piles and piles of paperwork, you know, gender assessment, environmental evaluations. There's not that many organizations in the world that can manage grants of the size the American government hands out or the bureaucracy that they come with. A lot of money ends up going to the same groups again and again. As recently as 2017, 60% of USAID funds went to just 25 recipients. This sort of stratified way of operating is incredibly expensive. There's a nonprofit group called ShareTrust And they reckon that aid agencies could save 32 cents of each dollar that they spend on overheads and salary costs if they used local intermediaries rather than these massive international ones.

So if this is a common complaint, then USAID must know about it, perhaps be trying to do something about it.

Administration after administration, both Democrats and Republicans, have tried to do this localization. During the Obama administration, they wanted 30% of funding to go to local groups. They missed that. In the Trump administration, they called it the Journey to Self-Reliance. At that point, it was, you know, local communities should look after themselves, we should save taxpayer money. And then when Joe Biden took office, he appointed Samantha Power as administrator of USAID. She's a really high-profile figure. She's a former ambassador to the United Nations. She's a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, and she's really staked her reputation on reforming USAID. She sat down and talked to me about why she thinks USAID will do better if it works more with local groups. You know, the people who have gone through even the exercise of designing, implementing, evaluating will remain in these communities, and that just seems like a much more enduring form of development. She set the goal of getting 25% of USAID's funds to local organizations by 2025. That's actually incredibly ambitious. Publish What You Fund, a campaign for aid transparency, looks at a bunch of USAID projects in about 10 countries between 2019 and 2021. And their data suggests that only between 6% and 11% of USAID project funding goes directly to local groups, depending how you define what's local.

It sounds as if every goal that's been set for USAID has been missed in some way. What can be done? What should be done, do you reckon?

So on this map of power, 3 big things are changing. First of all, USAID is trying to increase its staffing. With more staff, every contract officer could be dishing out less money. So if I have to give out let's say $10 million in a year, you can see why I'd be tempted to give it out in big projects to contractors I know. If I'm dealing with smaller sums, I'm more likely to experiment with local groups who can only handle small amounts of money. And so Samantha Power explained to me why staff can then, you know, make the grants process easier for applicants. Also, we are now in a position to tell our teams you're going to get the help that you need. You're going to get the additional support that it might require, you know, to translate that request for proposals into local languages. Or— Secondly, the agency is trying to make itself more accessible. A lot of these groups in the developing world especially can't deal with the hurdles that USAID funding comes with. So the agency's launched a new website to try to sort of talk people through what it's like to work with them. They're trying to incentivise their teams to get to know local organisations, to train them up. And thirdly, they're really shaking up their relationship with those big intermediaries like the Beltway Bandits. They're pressuring them that, you know, if you get USAID projects, you really have to work with local organisations and train them so that next time they might win a USAID project themselves. But, you know, there's still a lot to be done before USAID meets that 25% target. What more to be done then? The truth is that USAID in part has its hands tied. Lawmakers really decide a lot of what the agency can and cannot do. In some missions, as much as 90% of spending is driven by what's called congressional earmarks. That means lawmakers have decided what aid funding should go to in these countries, And the USAID officials on the ground don't have much sort of flexibility to make decisions. There is, however, some hope that things could change. There are corners of USAID where progress has taken place. For example, one of the most famous projects under USAID is called PEPFAR. It's the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. And it's saved millions and millions of lives over the last 20 years. PEPFAR has managed to increase the share of money that it gives to local groups between 2018 and 2021 from 32% to 53%. And that's clearly, clearly been really useful for AIDS efforts, but it's also meant, for example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, there were healthcare systems on the ground, there was public information campaigns ready on the ground, which could then redeploy to work on COVID-19. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle keep holding it up as an example. And that makes sense. You know, one former administrator of USAID said to me, development isn't something you do to people. It's something that people do to themselves.

Thanks very much for joining us, Avantika.

Thanks for having me, Jason.

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Given what our planet looks like from space, Earth seems like a bad name for it. Two-thirds of it, after all, is covered by water. Oceanographers point out that significantly more of Mars has been mapped than has the seabed of our own planet. And come on, there's plenty more life to look at. 80% of Earth's known livable habitat lies beneath the waves. From humpback whales and dolphins to giant tube worms, from coelacanths to yeti crabs, and who knows what else. Seriously, no one knows what else is down there. But a new initiative hopes to put that right, bringing benefits far beyond just cataloging creatures.

This project is called the Ocean Census. Ocean Census was launched just a couple weeks ago.

Abby Berthix is a science correspondent at The Economist.

And they have the grand goal of discovering 100,000 new marine species in the next 10 years.

So when you say launch, do you mean that in the literal on a boat sense?

Yeah, literally. So a couple days after the official launch that was held in London, the first research ship set sail into the Barents Sea. This was a Norwegian icebreaker named after the Crown Prince of Norway. The Ocean Census is backed by two organizations. One is British, Necton, a marine research institute, and the other is Japanese, the Nippon Foundation, a really big charitable organization. And this ship that set sail into Norway, it's carrying all sorts of special equipment that they will use to collect DNA, take pictures, basically all sorts of data collection that they'll be able to use to discover these new species.

100,000 of them, you said. I mean, what's the motivation here?

100,000 might seem like a lot, but actually scientists think that there are more than 2 million species of animals in the ocean. And so far we've only discovered or counted or labeled roughly a tenth So most of the ocean still remains a mystery and is really unknown. So one of the main goals of this voyage, or one of the main purposes, is just kind of like the pure joy of scientific discovery. If you talk to a bunch of these scientists, a bunch of these people, they're just super, super excited to discover the unknown in the ocean on this planet. But also there's a lot of real pragmatic reasons why it's important to discover these new species. For one, a lot of these oceanic species can have chemicals or compounds or ways about them that will help to advance medicine and biotechnology. For example, there was a snail discovered, a cone snail, that has a pain-killing compound that is 1,000 times stronger than morphine. There was a cystic fibrosis drug discovered from a substance in marine algae, and a lot of other drugs and compounds, including this kind of glue substance for cars have come from the ocean.

I remember a fairly similar-minded mission some time ago by Craig Venter, who wanted to catalog the DNA of the entire ocean, a very similar kind of attempt to catalog all that was in it. Has this kind of thing not been done before?

I mean, yes. So ocean expeditions have gone for a long time. Craig Venter's mission, it was called the Global Ocean Sampling Expedition. He went on his own ocean yacht, sailed around the ocean, and collected lots of DNA from ocean water. He was really focused on microbes. And he discovered that there's a lot of life going on in there, and the ocean is very rich in microbes. There was another project similar to the Ocean Census that was called the Census of Marine Life. This took place in the early 2000s. That one was for big animals as well. They were really trying to categorize the diversity of ocean life, and that really laid the foundation for what is gonna happen in the Ocean Census. And there's still a lot that we don't know about the ocean. Even recently, a couple of species of new whales were discovered. As well as the longest animal ever known. It was a siphonophore, which is kind of like this jellyfish, half the length of a football field. But not only is there still a lot to discover about the ocean, there are several important reasons for why it needs to happen quite soon. Why is that? One of them is an existential question. Scientists are running out of time. Climate change is making oceans warmer. It's acidifying them because the increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are dissolving into the water and making the water more acidic. And this is causing a lot of species to die out. For example, about half of the coral reefs have been lost, and coral reefs are a major habitat for marine life. So we're basically trying to catalog the forest before it all burns down.

I guess the question is how exactly it's doing all of this cataloging. Are we talking about sonar? Are we talking about dragnets? What exactly are they doing on this research ship?

It's probably going to be a little bit of everything. First, we need to find these animals. This will probably be through submarines or remotely operated vehicles going down to the depths because we've explored the surface quite a bit, but down in the trenches, it's a little more difficult to get down there safely. And then another part is imaging animals when they're down there. So once we find them, it's not enough to say, ah, look, we found something. We have to catalog it. We have to take pictures of what it looks like. There's new technology out there that lets you take laser pictures of jellyfish in the very, very depths of the ocean. And this is really important because if you try to take these jellyfish out of the depths to the surface in order to take pictures of them and document them, they'll kind of just turn to a gooey ball of slime. The pressure is really important to keep them intact. So if we're able to image them in the column, that is much better. And then the third main component is the genomics part. So you want to sequence the DNA of these organisms. You use these DNA sequences to figure out, is this a new species? How are these species related? And the DNA helps you to reconstruct the tree of life of these organisms and how they all interconnect. It's called cyber taxonomy.

Do you have any guesses as to or hopes about what might actually be found here? The Loch Ness Monster, probably.

It'd be really, really cool if we found Atlantis for once. No, I have no idea, but that's part of what's so cool about it. Just 50 years ago in 1977, we discovered that there are these vents under the ocean that are super, super deep under the ocean, and they're kind of spewing sulfur and methane. And there's a ton of life around them. 50 years ago, we didn't know that those existed. I mean, we didn't know that all of those animals around there that are, rather than photosynthesizing, getting energy from the sun, they're chemosynthesizing and getting energy from these vents. We didn't know that they existed. So it's impossible to a priori guess what's going to come, but it'll be really exciting. Abby, thanks very much for your time. Thank you, Jason.

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