This study investigates the structure of school organization as a driving force for implementation of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The aim is to contribute to the understanding of how principal’s choices and decisions at organizational level influence implementation of ESD.

The development in practice and research, and also ways of measuring and understanding ESD has formed different school traditions towards ESD (Östman, Scott, Gough 2003, Breiting, Wickenberg 2010, Bourn 2008). They are for example known as waves of ESD (Scott, Gough 2003), or transmissive respectively transformative education (Reid, Nikel et al. 2006, Nikel, Lowe 2010). In this proposal we denote them as different phases of ESD. Implementing ESD during the first phase was to provide "guiding principles" for teachers and students (Sund & Wickman, 2011). During the second phase of ESD, activities and concrete initiatives was pointed out as implementation strategies. However these ways of implementing ESD has proven less successful and are criticised for being normative since activities often had predefined outcomes (Mogensen, Schnack 2010Wickenberg, 2006; Öhman et al. 2009). Therefore the approach of action competence as a way forward to implement ESD have been suggested (Mogensen, Schnack 2010). Action competence requires democratic actions and pluralistic perspectives of teaching (Mogensen & Schnack 2010,Öhman, Öhman 2012). Implementation of ESD according to phase three is distinguished from the prior phases in the shift from applying ESD onto already known educational value systems, to instead use ESD and values accompanying the definition of ESD as ground for implementation (Reid, Nikel et al. 2006, Tilbury 2007, Wals 2007). This third phase of ESD is manifested in the new Swedish curricula (SKOLFS 2011). However less is known about whether if and how these attempts of implementation have led to changes of school practice.

To succeed with the third phase of ESD-implementation Breiting and colleagues has proposed that ESD quality criteria can be seen as a tool for school organization to demonstrate and detect how quality components work together within an organisation (Breiting et al. 2005). Quality of ESD refers to education that promotes learning competencies, for example a holistic approach, envisioning change and achieving transformation of value system that constructs learning in school organizations (Mogensen & Schnack 2010, Breiting et al. 2005, de Haan 2010). Quality criteria comprise of these different competencies. In this study we investigate if, and which quality criteria that have been used in the implementation process of ESD by studying school leaders’ conceptions of quality.

Swedish schools have during the 21^st century been organized according to two different traditions of viewing quality within school organization (Scherp 2013). In the first tradition organizations attain high quality by reaching consensus within the school organization, i.e. principals, teachers and student share opinions and beliefs. In the second tradition the strategy to organize schools for high quality is based on the school's ability to exhibit considerable variation within the school. Variation can be described as different perceptions and mental settings based on background and value systems.  In this tradition  a school organizations’ ability to interact with pupils and the surrounding society is at focus to reach high quality (Mogensen, Schnack 2010).

The ESD-perspective of phase three has many similarities with the school organizational tradition that builds on variation because the pluralistic ESD perspective in phase three also  sees variation as quality criteria. Therefore by combining these two frameworks: the quality criteria of ESD and school organization framework  this study is able to find interactions between the ESD implementation of phase three and school organization. Hence, the main objective in this paper is to study how traditions of school-organization effect the implementation of ESD.

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