As the waters inch up around their homes, fields, and ancestral lands, the villagers from a small province in Guatemala watch. Children stare with their mouths open, some men cry. Animals that are too slow and hundreds of species of plants are washed away. Plodding back to their new makeshift homes, women steel themselves for the upward battle of making a new life from scratch. Miles upstream, engineers breathe a sigh of relief. A new dam has been successfully put in place with the promise to provide electricity for thousands.

It’s expensive to build a dam, so many countries need outside money to do it, so multilateral development banks, foreign governments, and private firms step up to help meet these needs. But what is the most socially and environmentally sustainable way to undertake large development projects, and who should fund and implement them? These questions have drawn intense scrutiny and debate in recent years because of high-profile cases in which projects have gone very wrong, like massive flooding at the Hidroituango dam in Colombia.

Although not every internationally funded development project involves displacement or environmental destruction, far too often they do. Dam projects bring electricity but resettlement of communities; transmission lines threaten indigenous farming communities; roads destroy biodiverse hotspots. The CEOs and bank directors that make decisions about projects are often shadowy figures that never see the harm projects cause and have little incentive to improve their practices. What makes structural change even more difficult is that American voters, citizens of the country that holds the most voting power in almost all development banks and provides funding to private companies, are unaware of their tacit participation in these projects.

The multilateral development banks—the World Bank being the best known—that provide public funding for a range of development projects have begun to emphasize the importance of private funding to reach development goals. Another source of international funding that is increasingly important and even less transparent than that from multilateral development banks comes from specific governments and the private sector, with China rising rapidly in their share of the global lending portfolio. All multilateral development banks have policies in order to isolate themselves from risk and to protect the environment and communities, but when the private sector is involved, standards are more relaxed. The effects of these shifts in funding are drawing attention in the development sphere, but not many people from outside of it are even aware that any change occurred in the first place.

I plan to investigate the environmental and human rights effects of international lending to projects in Latin America. While environmental and human rights defenders lose their lives for their work in Latin America, the faces and voices of the communities feeling the impacts of a development project rarely reach the public in the United States. As the United States reconsiders its lending policies through the BUILD Act, and private sector financing increases at exponential rates, now is the time for people who care about communities and the environment to find their voice. The damage caused by poorly designed projects is easy to spot; what is harder to understand is the opaque world of development finance that led to the project being funded in the first place. At this time of rapid change in the development sphere, I will shed light on these issues so that readers are educated and empowered to take action on this complicated topic.