*Proceeding Paper* **Students' Action Competence for Sustainability and the Effectiveness of Sustainability Education †**

**Daniel Olsson 1,\*, Niklas Gericke <sup>1</sup> and Jelle Boeve-de Pauw <sup>2</sup>**


**Abstract:** Scholarly attention has recently been increasingly focused on the concept of action competence for sustainability and its importance to promote environmental citizenship. Still, knowledge about the effects of sustainability education (SE) as an approach to teaching to foster students' environmental citizenship in terms of action competence for sustainability, where SE could be defined by holism (the approach to the sustainability content) and pluralism (the approach to teaching). The aim of this study is therefore to contribute new knowledge of effects of SE on young people's self-perceived action competence for sustainability (SPACS), through a longitudinal design. Our results show that SE as a teaching approach is effective in fostering environmental citizenship in terms of the important aspect of action competence for sustainability.

**Keywords:** longitudinal; action competence; environmental citizenship; holism and pluralism
