Perhaps the most important issue in our time is how to sustain our planet’s resources, while developing wealth and well-being for a growing population. This monumental task has been defined in the concept of sustainable development (SD). During the last few decades the world communities have agreed upon addressing SD through international treaties. As a response Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has been launched as an answer to cope with sustainability. However, empirical studies are a missing link in the discourse around ESD, where decisions and implementation strategies are heavily based on policy recommendations and gut feelings by practitioners. We used data from 2413 students in grades 6, 9, and 12 from 51 schools across Sweden to study the effectiveness of ESD. In line with the current debate on the definition of ESD, we quantified the extent to which teaching can be labeled as holistic and/or pluralistic. Through a series of descriptive analyses and the estimation of structural equation models, our results indicate that ESD can indeed impact on student outcomes in terms of their sustainability consciousness. The results of this study reveal the key role ESD plays in addressing SD, paving the way for a more sustainable future.

During the past decade, numerous schools in Sweden have implemented education for sustainable development (ESD) as an explicit guiding approach in teaching. In this paper, we investigate the effect of this approach in comparison with that of pupils taught in ordinary schools. Accordingly, we introduce the concept of sustainability consciousness to represent the holistic view of sustainability. Within the concept of sustainability consciousness, we combine and investigate the environmental, economic, and social dimensions of sustainable development in terms of sustainability knowingness, attitudes, and behavior. A Likert-scale questionnaire with 50 items was developed to evaluate pupils’ sustainability consciousness through a nationwide study in Sweden. A total of 1773 pupils from the 6th and 9th grades participated. The results indicated that the ESD profile schools had a small positive effect on the pupils’ sustainability consciousness, while in grade 9 the effect was negative. The implications for further ESD implementation are discussed.

This study revisits the seminal question of the effectiveness of education for sustainable development (ESD) by using a novel longitudinal approach. Scholarly attention in the past decade has been increasingly directed towards the concept of action competence for sustainability. However, little is still known about the effects of ESD as a teaching approach to help develop students’ action competence for sustainability. This study therefore adopts a three-wave longitudinal design, tapping into the development of 760 Swedish upper secondary students’ self-perceived action competence for sustainability as related to their experience of ESD teaching at their school. We can conclude that ESD has effect on students’ action competence for sustainability. Our longitudinal growth models show that it is possible to develop students’ action competence, which is affected by their experience of ESD teaching at their school. However, the students did not significantly develop the action competence component confidence under their own influence. Our findings reveal that developing students’ action competence by implementing ESD in formal education takes time, and they shed light on the need for longitudinal research studies in the field of ESD.

The concept of Action Competence (AC) has been interpreted in different ways in various domains of the educational sciences. Given the rising scholarly attention to AC, these diverse interpretations are problematic because they hinder a common understanding of the concept among scholars. We unravel the interpretation of AC as a competence of people versus that of an educational approach. We call the latter education for sustainable development (ESD), and discuss the approach as predominantly being a subjectification model of education. Furthermore, we offer an updated and refined generic definition of action competence as a competence of people. To this end, we develop an ecology of psychological concepts that underpin AC. We present a theoretical perspective based on the concepts of “action” and “competence”, for stronger consideration of AC as a competence of people. We relate this generic concept of AC to concepts such as commitment, passion, knowledge, and self-efficacy for solving controversial problems. Finally, we introduce the specific concept of “Action Competence in Sustainable Development” (ACiSD) to articulate the competence of people to engage in solving sustainability issues.

Previous research has shown that interest in and concern about environmental issues tends to decrease in adolescence, but less is known about adolescents' broader consciousness of sustainable development, also including economic and social issues. This study investigates students' sustainability consciousness in the transition to adolescence. This was done by surveying 2,413 Swedish students in the sixth, ninth and twelfth grades using an age-adapted questionnaire. The results unambiguously show that Swedish students' sustainability consciousness dips in adolescence, strongly indicating a need to modify the sustainability education for adolescents. Education for sustainable development is recommended as an approach to meet that need.