“Gwadar’s economic potential has become a center of debate in national and international media. Less discussed are the people living there, especially the native communities who are mostly dependent on fishing as source of livelihood. Most of the available studies have taken a quantitative approach, obscuring the genuine voices of the local people into a jugglery of figures. This study aims to take a people-centric approach by employing qualitative methodology with grounded theory as a research design. The study is primarily aimed to explore the perspective of native people in Gwadar regarding the positive and negative impact of CPEC projects. The study is important because the success of any development project is based on the perception and cooperation of the local communities. Specifically, this study has been designed to explore and analyze the knowledge, understanding, fears, and expectations of local people in Gwadar to better understand the viewpoint of the native people whose lives are affected the most (both positively and negatively) by the CPEC projects.

Intensive fieldwork will be carried out in Gwadar city to collect data from various groups of the native people including fishermen communities, people displaced by the CPEC projects, daily wage laborers, local community leaders/influential, micro businessperson etc. Both male and female members of these communities will be studied for better understanding how different group are affected differently by different projects. This study will help in shifting the focus from national to the local, from economic and strategic to social and cultural, from competing elites to the grassroots, and from quantitative to qualitative implications of CPEC, thereby bridging the knowledge and policy gap.”