Young people play a major role in the (future) implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and in a successful sustainable transformation on a global but also on a regional scale. Thus, it is time to offer effective support and attractive learning opportunities for the young generation, so that they can gain the necessary competencies and are empowered to actively take part in the transformation process.

However, the question remains how these learning settings can be designed so that all young people are addressed, motivated, and well equipped for working on solutions for future challenges. To develop adequate learning interventions, we need to know more about the awareness of sustainability and the sustainability competencies of young people. In Germany, there are several well established surveys which collect data about the everyday life, attitudes and opinions of young people on a regular basis [1-5]. This is a good starting point, nevertheless, we assume that there are relevant differences between different regions which we should be aware of while developing new learning interventions. The existing data from the German studies does not allow to have a closer look only on the data set of a specific area, i.e. in our study the northwest part of Lower Saxony with rural regions. Furthermore, we put a focus on the diversity of young people concerning their social background, their interests, and their needs in order to address all social groups and to give them the chance to participate and contribute to the transformation process. In many existing studies, there is a pre-bias towards groups with a higher affinity to sustainability since these persons are probably more open to participate in interviews on this topic, for instance. Consequently, we conduct focus group discussions with a diversity of groups of young persons from different contexts to learn more about their awareness of sustainability and their sustainability competencies.

This lays the basis for the development of learning interventions which are grounded on the concepts of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) [6] and learning workshops [“Lernwerkstaetten”], a concept that emerged in the German speaking countries in the 1990s [7]. Thus, the new formats rely on action-oriented and transformative pedagogy with a focus on the learners, reflection loops, participation, and explorative and interconnected learning as main pedagogical principles [8 and 9]. In addition, the design of the learning environment plays a major role to implement these pedagogical claims. Here, the concept of learning workshops gives a valuable frame especially on how an environment is designed so that it guarantees diverse ways of learning, an atmosphere of astonishment, irritation, exploration, invention, and inspiration [10].

The combination of existing experiences with these concepts and the newly gained data from the focus groups allow us to develop new approaches tackling the challenge of actually empowering young people to actively take part in the sustainable transformation.

In order to reflect on cross-regional aspects but also to identify regional specifics, the exchange on a European level can be very helpful. Even though, we start on a regional level with addressing groups of young people, our findings and the newly developed concepts can be part of an international discourse about how to empower young people for the globally needed sustainable transformation. However, for this discourse, the groundwork of actually understanding the addressed groups is important; with our study, we aim at contributing to this.

The essential data is collected by conducting focus group discussions [11] with groups from different contexts. The participants are between 14 and 25 years old and interviewed groups normally consist of 5-8 people. In order to meet the young people in an environment in which they feel comfortable, we work with groups where the young persons actively and on a voluntary level decided to take part in and in which they know each other quite well. The group contexts range from Fridays For Future activists and nature/environment protection groups, groups from church, sport teams, to groups from youth cafés. With this, we aim to include young people from all different educational backgrounds as well as from a diverse range of social milieus. The focus group discussions will cover the following aspects: Recent issues on a global and local scale, relevance of the different SDGs, assessment of the personal sustainability competencies, engagement for sustainability, and learning habits and needs. The focus group discussions are audio recorded and the transcripts are analysed via the qualitative content analysis [12].

With this study, we gain insights into the awareness of sustainability and the sustainability competencies of different groups of young people living in the northwest part of Lower-Saxony in Germany. Consequently, we better understand how we can effectively reach out to young people and how ESD learning environments should look like to successfully engage young people in these learning processes. It reveals important findings on a textual as well as on a pedagogical level, which are a relevant basis for the development of new learning interventions. The spatial focus of the study is on the area of northwest Lower Saxony in Germany – however, the results can serve as an example for rural areas and it will be very interesting to compare the existing awareness of sustainability and the sustainability competencies of young people from this area with the findings from other European rural areas. In addition, identifying and reflecting on similarities or main differences compared to urban areas may also help to gain a better understanding how to provide effective learning opportunities for the young generation in the context of the local and global sustainable transformation. Thus, the international perspective can be supportive for the actual development of the new learning interventions.

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