Since the launch of the international volunteering programs “International Citizenship Service” and the “Weltwärts” Program in the UK and Germany, both focusing on development related issues and at-tached to the respective ministries of international development, the discussion on global learning, global engagement and the impact of volunteer services has received new attention in academia and in practice. While these programs may not have a substantial impact on local (sustainable) development, they do have the potential to sensitize participants to global issues and make them capable of acting in ways consistent with sustainable development. The principle of “sustainable development” is defined to take ecological, economic, social and cultural consequences of global development into account. Thinking and acting within the overall concept of sustainable development is the basis of a future-orientated dealing with the increasing unification of world society, economic growth and unprecented mobility. Therefore, individuals must develop individual sustainability awareness as a prerequisite for committed action. Based on psychological definitions of environmental awareness, sustainability awareness can be described as a construct of cognitive, affective and be-havioral components that involves impact of the four dimensions of sustainability – ecological, economic, social and cultural. To develop this complex construct (or parts of it) in people´s minds, innovative learning settings, which promote affective and cognitive components in learning processes, are required. International voluntary services in the so-called “Global South”, which are related to development issues, can serve as such new learning settings. They confront young adults with a topic of global development and provide first-hand experience of everyday life in a developing or emerging country.
This research focuses on individual learning processes through the experiences of participants during their stay abroad, including preparation and follow-up seminars, and their development of an aware-ness of sustainability. Anchored at the interface between sustainability sciences and educational sciences, the project aims to bring together approaches from international development education, global education and education for sustainable development. Impacts on participants’ attitudes can be expected in reference to learning theories like informal learning; transformative learning and empirical studies in relevant fields from educational and social sciences as well as intercultural and environmen-tal psychology and program evaluation studies.
The state of art in related disciplines suggests that international voluntary services in the global South do have cognitive, affective and behavioral effects on young individuals and their thinking and acting with respect to global issues. They are, therefore, beneficial for the development of sustainability awareness. However, no systematic correlation on an academic level between experiences in voluntary services in the global South and the construct of sustainability awareness has been carried out. For that, an analytical description of educational processes in the context of international voluntary services is needed. The central focus of this dissertation research is therefore on the identification and description of educational processes and their linkage with the components and dimensions of sustainability awareness: Which experiences are connected to participants’ knowledge, emotional relationships or capacities for acting on issues related to sustainable development?

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