Action Competence in Environmental, Health and Sustainability Education

The Action competence (AC) concept is formulated as a Bildung (political and democratic formation) perspective on the purpose of education, focusing on what it means to be educated. The twinning of AC as an overall perspective on the purpose of education - a “democratic curriculum perspective”, with a concept of competence, as well as the pliability of the latter, where components can be added or removed, would seem to partly explain why AC has proved to be a useful concept in a range of cultural contexts and educational fields. Rooted in the tradition of participatory and democratic education, it has played a central role in the related fields of environmental, health, and sustainability education. These have traditionally been viewed as different fields of education but work towards the UN’s Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development has led to a recent development of literature with a potential to bridge these fields. Based on the continuous and widespread use of the AC concept in the related research fields of environmental, health, and sustainability education over the last three decades, it seems fair to point out that it contains a general critical potential in relation to such boundary crossing.