Sustainability and Climate Change Education (SCCE) is important in its potential to empower learners to become agents for democratic transformations toward sustainability. A part of this potential lies in its possibility to facilitate action competence (AC) among learners, which entails knowledge of action possibilities (KAP), confidence in one’s own ability to take action (COI), and willingness to act (WTA) (Sass et al., 2020). However, to realize this potential, SCCE needs to be informed by feedback from adequate assessment instruments, of which one type is scaled self-assessment. Particular strengths of this type of instrument are for instance its suitability for large-scale statistical analyses (Redman et al., 2021), and its usefulness for assessing the more subjective constructs of COI and WTA. Nevertheless, based on insights from different theories of democracy (Buchanan & Tullock, 1962; Englund, 2006; Ruitenberg, 2009) and social change (Shove, 2010; Wilhite, 2013), we argue that scaled self-assessment instruments should: (a) distinguish between and assess both individual and collective AC, and (b) be grounded on, and capable of assessing, AC underpinned by different meta-theoretical perspectives on social change. If not, their potential to deliver feedback empowering learners with AC for democratic transformations would be severely circumscribed. Currently, no research has examined whether existing scaled self-assessment instruments for AC have the potential to assess these aspects of SCCE. Informed by theories of democracy and of social change, as well as a systematic review of instruments designed to assess AC and closely related learning objectives in SCCE, the purpose of this paper is threefold. First, we explore whether current scaled self-assessment instruments on AC distinguish between individual and collective AC as separate constructs. Second, we examine if they can be used to assess teaching and learning activities grounded on two key meta-perspectives on social change – one putting the emphasis on supporting individual behavioral change and the other on ways to empower agency for systemic change. Third, we scrutinize whether the items of the WTA construct in these instruments adequately assess the costs and drivers of social change, underscored through both meta-perspectives on social change. Our results show that current instruments are lacking in most of these regards. Consequently, we draw on theoretical perspectives, as well as on items and constructs from scaled self-assessment instruments designed to assess learning objectives closely related to AC, to discuss how a scaled self-assessment instrument could be developed to adequately assess these three aspects of AC.

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