This summer, I joined the Stimson Center’s Southeast Asia Program in Washington DC, where I spent my internship following a river, a supply chain, and a policy debate back to their sources in mainland Southeast Asia.

The Stimson Center is a nonpartisan think tank in Washington DC that works on pragmatic solutions to global security challenges. Within it, the Southeast Asia Program, led by Brian Eyler, focuses on the Mekong subregion, where questions of water, energy, environment, and governance cut across national borders. It is one of only a few think tanks that work extensively on mainland Southeast Asia. I had spent years studying broader ASEAN governance and regional security, and the team pushed me to think about security in a much more specific sense than I was used to.

While the program works on a range of issues in the region, such as countering scam operations and illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, my core portfolio was its work on transboundary heavy metal contamination in the Mekong basin. Rare earth and other mining in Myanmar’s Shan State has been linked to arsenic and other heavy metal pollution in northern Thailand’s Kok, Sai, Ruak, and Mekong rivers.  Communities downstream depend on these rivers for drinking water, farming, and fishing, yet the governance response has been slow and fragmented. The adverse impacts of mining is also felt by other communities in a southern province bordering Myanmar. 

As a part of the team, I produced news roundups tracking developments on the contamination issue, translating and summarizing Thai language media, NGO reports, and parliamentary materials into English for the team. Because so much of the most important reporting and policy discussion happens primarily in Thai, this work helped the program follow the issue in close to real time rather than waiting for English coverage to catch up.

I also mapped the Thai government agencies responsible for the response, including the Pollution Control Department, the Office of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy and Planning, and the Ministry of Public Health, into organizational charts. Alongside this, I summarized the policy interventions of the House Subcommittee on Transboundary Water Pollution, which helped clarify who in the Thai system actually holds authority over what.

Later in the summer, I also analyzed a draft bilateral arrangement between Thailand and Myanmar on the river contamination issue as it moved toward Thai cabinet consideration. Reviewing the text clause by clause, and assessing what it would and would not commit either government to, revealed not only the dynamics of environmental governance but also broader regional geopolitical dynamics, which are often shaped by external powers like China. Whether an agreement includes independent monitoring, who is allowed to see the results, and which rivers fall within its scope all show how closely institutional design exposes these dynamics.

The biggest lesson was that language access is a form of policy capacity. Much of what I contributed came not from any special expertise in environmental governance but from my ability to read Thai primary sources and my understanding of their cultural nuances, which allowed me to turn them into useful material for a Washington audience. 

On the technical side, I came away more confident in R and in data work generally. Turning messy government spreadsheets into a clean, defensible dataset is unglamorous, but it is often where the real evidence behind good policy comes from.

As a Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs scholar, I will enter my country’s diplomatic service after graduating. This internship gave me a view of a Thai foreign policy problem from the outside in: how it looks to researchers, NGOs, and policy analysts in Washington, and what kinds of evidence and arguments carry weight.

Having previously interned at Thailand’s Permanent Mission to the UN and the Royal Thai Embassy in Tokyo, I had seen diplomacy from inside government. Stimson showed me the think tank side, and how independent research can shape the options governments consider. Thanks to my supervisors, I was also able to sit in on some of the team’s internal meetings on administrative matters, where I learned a lot about how think tanks actually operate. I expect to carry both perspectives into my career, especially now on issues where environment and security overlap.

Living right next to the Capitol made it easy to feel part of the city’s policy life beyond the office. I am grateful to the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy summer internship fund for making this experience possible. Above all, I am grateful to Brian Eyler, Steve Ross, Courtney Weatherby, and Regan Kwan for trusting an intern with real, substantive work on an issue that matters so much to the region I come from.