While several students are engaged in the sustainability movement, when it comes to everyday choices of food, transportation and personal purchases, it is reported by several authors that major sustainability challenges such as climate change instil feelings of fear, confusion and hopelessness, especially among young people. Despite the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development and the Global Action Program under the auspices of the United Nations, there remains a call for curricula and teachers to reflect and respond to such a focus in formal education. International environmental agreements such as the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development and the Sustainable Development Goals highlight the expectations on education for sustainable development (ESD) to develop students’ competences so that they will be motivated to act on sustainability challenges in a competent, ethically sensitive, and critically reflective manner.

Action in ESD needs to be informed by both the knowledge there is about a sustainability challenge and the knowledge we do not yet have access to. The wickedness of sustainability problems seems to resist traditional scientific means of problem definition and problem solving. When approaching the complexity of a sustainability challenge by addressing for example ecological, economic, and social aspects, there are not only epistemic but also multiple ethical conflicts that arise. Any attempt to understand the complexity of these issues means that a door is opened towards uncertainty. Thus, scientific knowledge alone does not seem to be sufficient to make change come around or to make people want to act on sustainability issues. Therefore, an alternative strand of thought is used in this paper, that of uncertainties. Rather than focussing on what we already know about how to deal with various sustainability challenges in education, it might be relevant to focus on inconsistencies and the incompleteness of knowledge in order to render actionable knowledge and progressive decision-making. Attention to the role of uncertainty, wickedness, and complexity in the epistemology of sustainability is suggested to have an important function in education in general and in ESD in particular.

While the knowledge required to make various personal decisions which will impact their carbon footprints the global sustainability injustices require students to develop their ethical sensitivity and awareness, their competence not to avoid taking action. The notion of action can presumably refer to various changes due to internal or external drivers. Rather than introducing a roadmap to a sustainable future, action readiness invites the authorship of the students to substantiate ESD-action. To further probe the element of action as well as inaction, this paper addresses the motivational role of emotions. Emotions are investigated as an impetus for action, displaying various degrees in strength and urgency. Such emotions may be guided by students developing” green virtues”.  Two virtue ethicists that can inform what right and competent actions may be, are Ernest Sosa and Linda Zagzebski. Sosa addresses the performance-related concept of competence as accurate (true), adroit (competently produced) and apt (accurate because adroit). Zagzebski presents a theory of moral exemplars, who are identified by their actions. By the emotion of admiration of the actions of the moral exemplars, we may be motivated not to avoid taking action.

Ultimately the interest of the study is to influence and contribute to educational (ESD) practice, methodology and theory but specifically the study aims to answer two questions:

What constitutive elements of the concept of action readiness may influence action to a greater or lesser extent in education for sustainable development (ESD)?

How can a motivational theory of emotions be understood in relation to the notion of action and action readiness in ESD?

This study applies a phronetic trail in the analysis by approaching epistemological and ethical issues related to the notion of action. Two different virtue ethicists are invited. They are mirrored by each other, and thereby questions arise regarding each theory, while concepts fundamental to understanding the notion of action in ESD are explored. Based on an analysis of current scientific literature, this paper examines the re-emerging concept of epistemically initiated, ethically and emotionally motivated action. To act responsively, ethically, and competently against unsustainable processes in the present seems to be doable, but envisaging a future society, a good society of which students will not be a material part, requires something new in education. How students act will have implications for an envisaged future other, which seems to require developed moral imagination. In a second cycle of philosophical reflection and explication the framework of Nancy Tuana’s concept of moral literacy is used as a heuristic tool in the interpretation. Three major components of the framework are moral sensitivity, ethical reasoning skills and moral imagination, the latter of which seems to blend affective and rational processes. This framework has a pedagogical strand, which makes it interesting to introduce to the research field of ESD. In the remainder of the paper theoretical elaborations of dimensions of uncertainty in ESD arenas provide a basis for analysing the concept of action and understanding the motivational theories of emotions.

By outlining constitutive elements of the concept of action readiness through the motivational theory of emotion, new development of perspectives of various sustainability competences is expected, not least strategic and normative ones that together with sustainability pedagogy anchored in transformative and emancipative epistemology could help students and their teachers orient themselves and advance teaching methods in sustainability education. By exploring the motivational role of emotions in ESD, a broader understanding of actionable knowledge may be brought into play. This could provide guidance to educational practice and initiate empirical studies to explore the reasons students may harbour which make them content not to take action despite existent knowledge and good intentions. The result of the study is expected to be a development of perspectives of action and inaction in ESD. The concept of action readiness will be further explored, anchored in transformative and emancipatory “green” epistemology. The analysis will suggest pedagogical perspectives of how dimensions of uncertainty can be approached and evaluate the motivational theories of emotions in terms of coming to know and taking action, individually and collectively. The trail of moral theory can not only explain what moral beliefs and actions are, but can also offer guidance as to how teachers as well as students may relate to and structure the complex epistemic and ethical contexts of sustainability.

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