Urgent need for collective transformation in human activity is the baseline of critical approaches insustainability education, climate change education and environmental education. Scholars in these fields emphasize the potential of education to challenge the prevailing cultural norms that maintain unsustainable lifestyles and systems. However, a major gap between scholarly ideals and their implementation in educational systems persists. Better understanding of learning processes through which social, behavioural and cultural change may occur, including the key factors that enable or inhibit these processes, is needed to underpin transformative climate change education. (Andreotti et al. 2018; Evans et al. 2017; Zilliacus & Wolf 2021).

Value-action gap is a construct used to describe the discontinuity between an individual’s personal, pro-environmental values and their behaviour: even though people are environmentally aware, they don’t always act in a pro-environmental manner (Grandin et al. 2021). In order to develop effective educational approaches to overcome the value-action gap, psychological barriers and enablers of pro-environmental behaviour and climate agency need to be well understood. In this paper, we present empirical research on an under-researcher topic in this area: the role of growth mindsets (i.e. lay theories of malleability) as enablers of young people’s climate change agency.

Fixed and growth mindsets are networks of core beliefs about the nature of humans and cultures. Beliefs concerning the extent to which individual and group traits are malleable or fixed shape people’s ways of making sense of the socio-cultural reality and influence their ways of thinking about and acting towards change. Fixed mindset indicates low belief in the ability of humans and human groups to change, whereas growth mindset is a construct that is used when referring to a tendency to hold high beliefs in the malleability of human qualities. In intergroup contexts, growth mindsets predict, for instance, less aggression and anxiety and more openness and willingness to work toward improvement. Relevance of the mindset-phenomenon for education is amplified by the fact that even brief mindset interventions, if carefully contextualized and adapted to target populations, have achieve powerful and long-lasting impact on people’s willingness to work towards both personal change and change in the world. (Dweck & Yeager 2019; Goldenberg et al. 2020; Rattan et al. 2017)

Research which connects mindsets with climate change agency is also emerging. According to these recent studies, growth mindset about the world is associated with attitudes towards climate change, beliefs about its mitigation as well as pro-environmental behaviour (Duchi et al. 2020; Soliman & Wilson 2017). However, research that would explore how some of the core mindset dimensions – beliefs about the malleability of persons as well as beliefs about the malleability of human groups – are associated with climate change agency, is missing. In this paper, we present empirical evidence of the association between mindsets and climate change agency among European young people. The study is part of European Consortium CCC-CATAPULT (Challenging the Climate Crisis: Children’s Agency to Tackle Policy Underpinned by Learning for Transformation), which researchers young people’s experiences of and learning around the climate crisis in four European cities: Bristol (UK), Tampere (Finland), Galway (Ireland) and Genoa (Italy).

We explored the association between mindsets and climate agency through the following research questions: RQ1 What kind of mindsets do European young people have about a) persons and b) groups? RQ2 What kind of climate change agency do young people have? RQ3 How are fixed and growth mindsets associated with young people’s climate change agency? Participants (N=1814) of the study were 15–18-year-old young people from four European cities, Tampere (Finland) (n=553), Genoa (Italy) (n=392), Galway (Ireland) (n=507) and Bristol (UK) (n=352). They were reached through schools and answered an online survey in a classroom, in the presence of either teacher or researcher. The data was collected as part of the project CCC-Catapult, which utilizes a co-productive approach. Young people from the age group of the survey respondents were involved in the development of the survey as well as interpretation of its results. The research project was introduced to all respondents through a video recorded by the projects’ Youth Action Partnership group members. The survey included two scales measuring mindsets: Levy et al.’s (1998) four items were utilized to study mindset about persons (implicit theories about persons, ITP) and Halperin et al.’s (2011) four items to measure mindset about groups (implicit theories about groups ,ITG). We used a Likert scale (1=strongly disagree, 6=strongly agree), where lower scores indicated growth mindset tendencies and higher scores fixed mindset tendencies. Climate change agency was measured with several scales. Youth were asked to evaluate how often they discuss about climate change with their family, friends and teachers (Climate Justice Survey 2020, 2021). Six items were scored on a scale that varied from 1=never to 6=daily. Willingness to help to create a more sustainable world was measured with Adolescent Internal Environmental Locus of Control Scale (Colebrook-Claude, 2019). Six items were evaluated on a four-point scale 1=not at all important, 4=very important. Furthermore, barriers to act on climate change were studied with items adopted from Youth Climate Justice Survey 2020 (2021) (Likert scale 1=strongly disagree to 4 strongly agree). Psychometric properties of the scales and all analyses were computed in SPSS. One-way analyses of variances (ANOVA) were utilized to study differences between the countries as well as the association between mindsets and different dimensions of climate change agency.

According to the preliminary analysis of the data, European young people seem to be more inclined towards growth mindsets than fixed mindsets, with some statistically significant difference between the four countries participating in the study. Furthermore, young people who have stronger tendencies towards growth mindsets, report discussing climate change with other people more often, have higher willingness to help to create a more sustainable world and report less barriers to taking climate action. Altogether, our findings indicate that two central dimensions of growth mindsets – belief in the malleability of humans as individuals, and particularly in the malleability of the “kind of persons” they are, as well as belief in the malleability human groups, can be beneficial for the development of climate agency. Our data is correlational, and the causality could be also interpreted to the other direction – engaging in climate action leading to enhanced belief in the malleability of humans. However, earlier research with experimental designs gives reasons to interpret that the core beliefs regarding the ability of humans to change might serve as enablers or barriers for taking action (Goldenberg et al. 2020). There are important educational implications that relate to our findings. Mindset interventions that have taught about the malleability of the brain, or about historical examples of how major changes have happened in the thinking and behavior of human groups, have had powerful and long-lasting influence for their target groups’ mindsets, learning and behavior (Dweck & Yeager 2019). Low belief in the ability of people to change can be disheartening and decrease motivation to act to mitigate climate change, and be one important factor which maintains value-action gap. Therefore, learning from successful mindset interventions and integrating teaching about malleability of human qualities and human groups to climate change education is recommended.

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