The problems of global change and the search for sustainable solutions worldwide are central challenges of the present and future. However, the discussion on sustainability can only take effect if it connects to many fields of society and to various stakeholders. In addressing key social issues such as health and consumption, educational institutions play a pivotal role in providing youth and young adults with the competencies needed to shape and work towards a sustainable future (UNDESA 2002, EU Council 2006). The Project BINK (German acronym for „Educational Institutions and Sustainable Consumption“) sets out to explore how educational institutions can collaboratively engage with internal and external stakeholders to promote healthier and more sustainable lifestyle among young adults, especially considering food as an exemplary field of sustainable consumption. At the heart of the project lay three core assumptions: (a) Educational institutions have an effect on individual consumption in two ways. On one hand they act as a facilitator of educational offers related to healthy and sustainable consumption that make students reflect and render their own consumption patterns more conscious. On the other, educational institutions themselves are consumption households and as such places in which school members consume. This twofold character, being both a place of learning and a lifeworld in itself, scaffolds an educational institution‘s characteristic culture of consumption. (b) Research findings indicate that far more than 50 percent of learning takes place in informal learning settings (Dohnen 2001, Livingstone 2004). This potential has only been scarcely recognized by educational programmes so far. By way of implementing coordinated development measures that systematically align formal and informal learning settings, the project aims to collaboratively conceptualize, develop and stabilise a culture of sustainable consumption in six participating educational institutions. (c) The transformation process of an institution’s culture of consumption can neither be prescribed top-down nor implemented by single actors bottom-up. It requires the involvement of key players, multiple stakeholders and the establishment of new partnerships between different groups within the school-community as well as between the school-community and its external stakeholders. Thus, a transdisciplinary approach is chosen. The interventions are derived and further developed in close collaboration between the protagonists of the participating educational institutions, external stakeholders and scholars and researchers affiliated to the project. On the institutional level, steering committees are established, in which all key players and actors are represented and involved.

The processes of organizational change is guided and informed by the concept of an educational institution’s culture of consumption. The analytical framework evolved in three corresponding steps. (1) The theoretical foundation was derived from a review of existing theories related to participatory organizational development and organizational/school culture. (2) In an empirical study, a number of 24 non-affiliated educational institutions with different degrees of implemented and consolidated structures and initiatives related to sustainable consumption were examined in order to validate or complement the framework. (3) In a series of workshops and meetings with the steering committees of the affiliated educational institutions, a transdisciplinary discourse over the framework, its practicability and its implications for the change process in the institution was initiated. The framework was then used to analyze the current state of the institution’s culture of consumption and to set goals for developing measures of intervention.

As a result of the joint project, new theoretical and methodical findings as well as knowledge of practical relevance will be compiled regarding the question how educational institutions can use and benefit from partnerships and the participatory involvement of multiple stakeholders in a process of developing an institutional culture of sustainable consumption to promote and stabilise healthy and sustainable consumer behaviour among its students. Based on aggregated data on the outlined processes of organizational change in different types of educational institutions (from secondary and vocational schools to universities), the findings produced are expected to be of general relevance for participatoy processes of organizational learning in educational institutions. Thus, it can serve as a case model illustrating the potential contribution of educational institutions to the achievement of an overall pedagogical objective as layed out in the EU consumer policy strategy 2007-2013: the education of „confident, informed and empowered consumers“.