Communicative agency as a dimension of sustainability competence: evidence from an international higher education microcredential

Purpose Despite extensive research on sustainability education, a persistent challenge remains in understanding how students translate sustainability awareness into communicatively and socially actionable forms. While existing frameworks emphasise cognitive, affective and behavioural dimensions of sustainability competence, the role of communication in enabling action remains under-theorised. This study aims to address this gap by conceptualising communicative agency as a complementary and exploratory dimension of sustainability competence. Design/methodology/approach Adopting a qualitative exploratory case study design, the research combines diagnostic survey data with discourse analysis of student-produced artefacts within an international microcredential course on English Communication for Sustainable Development. The analysis focuses on how students construct sustainability discourse across key dimensions, including actor representation, attribution of responsibility, modalisation and audience positioning. Findings Findings show that students initially demonstrate strong normative awareness of the importance of communication but limited confidence in its practical application. Through project-based learning, students move from awareness towards the enactment of communicative agency, constructing sustainability as actionable by identifying agents, framing responsibility, calibrating urgency and feasibility and designing audience-oriented interventions. Communication emerges not only as the transmission of information, but as a discursive resource through which students begin to structure responsibility, agency and possible action. Social implications By foregrounding communication as a mechanism through which sustainability knowledge is translated into socially actionable forms, the study highlights the importance of preparing students to engage with sustainability challenges across diverse public, professional and institutional contexts. Communication-centred pedagogies may support more participatory and context-sensitive forms of sustainability engagement by enabling learners to identify relevant actors, negotiate responsibility and design audience-oriented interventions. Originality/value The study introduces communicative agency as a previously under-theorised dimension of sustainability competence, conceptualised as the discourse-mediated capacity to translate knowledge into socially actionable forms. By integrating sustainability education, discourse theory and communicative competence frameworks, the paper provides both a theoretical contribution – reframing a dimension of the knowledge–action gap as communicative in nature – and an empirical model for analysing how sustainability learning becomes operational in practice.