Call for papers for the 2025 edition of FIDIC’s Future Leaders Booklet
The Future Leaders Advisory Council (FLAC) of FIDIC is inviting submissions of papers for the 2025 edition of its annual FIDIC Future Leaders Booklet. The booklet, now in its ninth edition, will be launched at the 2025 annual FIDIC Global Infrastructure Conference in Cape Town in September where the theme will be Smart Infrastructure: Equality, Resilience and Innovation for a Sustainable World.
Infrastructure investment plays a pivotal role in driving economic growth, fostering development and enhancing the quality of life of the communities we live in all around the world. By laying the groundwork for sustained economic prosperity, robust infrastructure is crucial for ensuring social inclusion and equitable access to essential services like clean water, electricity and healthcare facilities to underserved communities. In the face of the big challenges that we are currently experiencing, such as rapid urbanisation, climate change and disruption of new technologies to mention a few, we aim to transform lives by investing and building a better world for all.
In 2024 FIDIC had so many successful submissions that it launched three booklets around sustainability, the construction sector and technology. These can be found here (click here). The Future Leaders booklet aims to highlight the importance of good, sustainable, ethical and efficient infrastructure investment in improving and enhancing both the global environment that we all depend on and the living standards and economic prospects of citizens around the world. It also provides a great level of exposure and publicitiy for published authors.
We encourage submissions that discuss and highlight the important role that Future Leaders play in shaping the future of the infrastructure industry and which demonstrate how current trends are shaping the future world we are living in. We invite Future Leaders from around the world to share their thoughts, experiences and ideas in this unique and exciting publication.
Booklet Theme: Smart Infrastructure: Equality, Resilience and Innovation for a Sustainable World - Investing Now for a Better Future
Papers are invited according to the following sub-themes:
- Sustainability and Resilience (Net Zero, Decarbonization, Nature Based Solutions, building resilient infrastructure)
- Social Sustainability (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, fair wages, mentoring, etc.)
- Investing to prevent unethical behaviours in projects i.e. The “darker side of projects” (Modern Slavery, Corruption, Unsustainable exploitation of resources, etc.)
- Digital revolution (Digital Transformation, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR), Robotics, etc.)
- Other - please specify
Important Dates:
5 May 2025 - Call for papers opens
27 June 2025 - Submission of papers closes
11 July 2025 - Shortlisting of papers for publication and presentation
21 September 2025 - Release of the FIDIC Future Leaders Booklet and Symposium in Cape Town
Eligibility Criteria:
Authors must be a Future Leader (under 40 years of age at the date of publication of the booklet) and satisfy at least one of the membership criteria below:
(1) Be a member of FIDIC’s Future Leaders Council
(2) Be a member of a FIDIC Regional Future Leaders Group
(3) Be a member of a FIDIC Member Association Future Leaders Group
(4) Be an employee of a member firm affiliated to a FIDIC Member Association (To confirm your Member Association, please visit FIDIC | Member associations | International Federation of Consulting Engineers)
Submission Guidelines
(1) All submissions must be made in English via the FIDIC web site: https://www.fidic.org/node/32998 (see the form below) on or before 27 June 2024 (midnight GMT) using the word template.
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(2) Length of the paper to not exceed 2 x A4 pages for content
(3) All authors are to supply a short biography (not exceeding 150 words) and a high-resolution picture of the author(s) of at least 1MB in resolution.
The FIDIC FLC reserve the right to shortlist articles for publishing against the above criteria and quality guidelines. Papers that do not get selected for the booklet may be published on other FIDIC platforms. Submitting authors are to be available to present their papers in person at the Future Leaders Symposium on Sunday 21 September 2025.
