Societal change calls for thorough readjustment of human agency to align with sustainability visions. Individual and collective actions that promote sustainability are required at many levels, including in the private lives of people and in the public sphere. Actions are needed to lower the environmental footprint of individuals and, at the same time, to catalyze a system-level adoption of sustainability. In recent years, young people have been at the forefront of collective sustainability efforts. Since its inception, the Fridays For Future -events have mobilized hundreds of thousands of predominantly young participants worldwide each year (“Strike Statistics”, 2024). In addition to strikes and demonstrations young people express their agency and drive sustainability in diverse ways (Oinonen & Paloniemi, 2023; Trott, 2021; Tayne, 2022).

To engage in action towards sustainability may require a variety of skills, knowledge, and attitudes. Frameworks that capture these sustainability competencies have been under intensive development during the last decade (e.g., Bianchi et al., 2022; UNESCO, 2017). Of particular interest has been action competence for sustainability, which has been defined as the overall will, confidence, and knowhow to bring about sustainability transformations (Sass et al., 2020). Action competence has been understood as an educational approach (Mogensen & Schnack, 2010) as well as an educational outcome, an underlying latent capacity of individuals and groups (Olsson et al., 2020). However, these is a lack of knowledge of how action competence and its subconstructs are related to different kinds of actions and behaviors that promote sustainability. Especially the role of knowledge of action possibilities in determining sustainability efforts is in a need for clarification. As complexity and uncertainty are fundamental parts of sustainability challenges (e.g., Lönngren & van Poeck, 2021), it is hard to know which efforts will produce the desired effects. Instead, actions emerge from a knowledge base that is always incomplete (Almers, 2013). The notion of pluralism in action-oriented knowledge emphasizes that multiple kinds of knowledge and different ways of knowing are involved in actions for sustainability (Caniglia et al., 2021; Wals, 2010). Therefore, reaching an end-goal of enough knowledge is not feasible when tackling wicked sustainability problems. This concerns particularly collective actions that are directed on system-level change, since tracing their legacies is a tedious task even for experts (Amenta et al., 2010). 

To investigate the relationship between action competence and sustainability actions, we conducted a national survey of 15 to 29-year-olds (N = 940) in Finland. We asked how action competence for sustainability is related to both private sphere behavior and collective action that drive change. Results of structural equation modeling show that the overall measure of self-perceived action competence for sustainability strongly predicts private sphere behavior, but the association is nonexistent with system-oriented sustainability action. Further analysis on the components of action competence reveals that high perceived knowledge and low outcome expectations predict low engagement in sustainability action. Knowledge and outcome expectations also affect behavior indirectly via willingness to act. Based on our results we argue that actions and behaviors have different antecedents, and that the ability to recognize outcome uncertainty affects how young people’s sustainability agency is manifested.

The survey measures were translated, adapted to the Finnish context, and tested with four groups of young people. We requested a sample of 1000 Finnish speaking young people aged 15–29 from an online panel maintained by Kantar Media Finland Oy. After screening the data, 940 participants were retained, of which 43% were male, 56% female, and 1% did not specify. 25% were aged between 15–19, 37% were aged between 20–24, and 38% were aged between 25–29 years old. Action competence was measured with the Self-Perceived Action Competence for Sustainability -scale (Olsson et al., 2020) which consists of 12 items covering three subconstructs: knowledge of action possibilities, confidence in one’s own influence and willingness to act. The scale has a 5-point response format (1 = strongly disagree … 5 = strongly agree). Sustainability action was measured with 16 items adapted from Alisat and Riemer’s (2015) Environmental Action Scale. These actions range from low-profile efforts, such as participating in events and raising awareness in social media, to highly devoted activism, such as organizing protests or public events. Sustainability behavior was measured with eight private sphere behavior items, such as preferring vegetarian meals, buying eco-labelled products, and educating oneself. Actions and behaviors were assessed on a 5-point scale (0 = never … 4 = very frequently) according to the rate at which the respondent had performed them in the last six months. We used the structural equation modeling framework to assess two competing models. In model A, we estimated how action competence for sustainability as a higher order factor predicts sustainability action and behavior. In model B, we disaggregated action competence in its sub-scales to see how they were associated with sustainability efforts. In addition, in model B we specified direct associations from knowledge of action possibilities and confidence in one’s own influence on willingness to act, in order to estimate their indirect effects on sustainability action and behavior. We evaluated local and global fit of the models by inspecting the correlation residual matrices and examining a set of fit statistics (model chi-square, RMSEA, CFI and SRMR). We refrained from hanging onto firm cutoff criteria and evaluated the fit indices in the context of the scales’ measurement quality (McNeish et al., 2018). The models were run using the ‘lavaan’ package in R with two estimators: maximum likelihood with Satorra-Bentler scaling and weighted least squares mean and variance adjusted.

Our results suggest that action competence as a higher order construct is positively related to personal practices, such as preferring a plant-based diet, but it doesn’t predict collective actions that are targeted at a system-level change, such as organizing sustainability-themed events and protests. This is unexpected, since the theory of action competence emphasizes action that aims to solve the problems or change the conditions that created the problems (Mogensen & Schnack, 2010). Furthermore, we found that scoring high on knowledge of action possibilities is associated with less sustainability action, and that the relationship is nonexistent with private-sphere behavior. We argue that respondents who score high on the knowledge subconstruct represent young people who have more confidence in their knowledge base and possibly disregard the uncertainties of sustainability challenges, thus having little motivation to take actions with unforeseeable outcomes. By contrast, respondents who score less on the knowledge subscale are not necessarily short of knowledge, but they may recognize their limits of knowing and deliberate more thoroughly on their agency. These young people acknowledge the uncertainties and risks that are an inevitable part of sustainability, which is precisely why they have a greater urge to make sustainability efforts targeted at the system level. Our findings are of key relevance for sustainability education and to understand youth engagement. Strong arguments have been made that sustainability education should support the development of thinking skills that help learners to embrace uncertainty, reflect on their values, appraise the adequacy of their knowledge base, and adjust their actions accordingly (Bianchi et al., 2022; Mogensen & Schnack, 2010; UNESCO, 2017). These skills and competencies are strongly linked to the ways in which young people’s sustainability agency might emerge.

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