The idea of sustainability aims to enable everyone today and in the future to live a good life within the boundaries of our planet. Global development trends in the social and ecological sphere within the last decades conclude that little progress has been made toward this goal. Consumption is considered one of the key drivers of unsustainable development. Consequently, numerous initiatives are seeking to explore what sustainable consumption could look like, and how patterns of consumption could be changed into the direction of sustainable consumption. In the policy discourse, the education system is assigned a pivotal role in the overall efforts to reorient the mindsets and practices of consumers toward sustainability.

However, educational institutions see themselves confronted with a daunting task, as their major goal has yet been to develop critical, independent thinkers rather than to enforce politically desirable changes in the consumer behaviour of students. Thus, the cause of promoting sustainable consumption in schools requires an educational foundation and (re)framing. This study seeks to explore ways as to what schools can contribute to mastering the global consumption challenge. In order to find answers to this question, this thesis draws on insights from both the field of educational research, and the field of social sustainability science and education for sustainable development as a relatively young field of scholarship that links the two fields. The cumulative dissertation comprises of six publications that approach the research interest from different perspectives and specify it in three strands of research.

The first strand develops a conceptual understanding of the domain sustainable consumption. Starting from a wide understanding of consumer actions, different phases are distinguished - from selecting to reusing and disposing consumer goods. In the context of sustainability, consumer actions are addressed under an overarching objective. This objective is to maintain or create such conditions that enable all people today and in the future to meet their objective needs, so that they can realize their ideas of a good life. With this goal in mind, consumer actions can be qualified in two ways now: with regard to the intentions underpinning them, and with regard to the impacts caused by them.

The second strand adopts the perspectives of educational philosophy and school theory. It asks for the functions and tasks that characterize schools as educational organizations and that constitute the framing conditions of school-based learning. In a conceptual approach, several complexes of functions are distinguished, based on sociological school theory. According to that, schools provide comprehensive contributions to the enculturation and acculturation process of youths and young adults, for example by means of their formal educational offers, but also as informal learning settings and socialization agencies.
The conceptual analytical framework developed in the context of the dissertation, drawing on works in the field of school and organisational culture, discloses those levels and domains that are of high relevance for students’ consumer learning and that shape the culture of consumption of an educational organization. Beyond enculturation and acculturation, schools qualify young people for specific societal demands and seek to promote their students’ capacity to act und judge independently as an overall pedagogical objective. These functions of qualification and subjectivation are further elaborated on in a competency-based approach developed as part of this dissertation. The approach reconciles two conflicting goals: the sustainability-oriented goal to qualify students to consume more sustainably, on the one hand, and the pedagogically-oriented goal to educate students to become autonomous subjects. In a didactic perspective, the implications of sustainability as the principle of consumer education are discussed and assembled in a salutogenetic conception of sustainable consumer education developed as part of this dissertation. In a genuinely educational sense this didactic concept focuses on the reflection of one’s own relation to consumer society and its underpinning ideals, putting the quest for more sustainable ways of meeting needs at the heart of the approach.

The third strand, finally, adopts the perspectives of research into learning and school development and pursues the question how schools can change in order to make a contribution to the promotion of sustainable consumption that is both pedagogically legitimized and effective. This question is answered by three papers of this cumulative dissertation. A conceptual paper develops a participatory school development approach to change the organizational culture of consumption that was then implemented in six educational organizations. Two empirical papers draw on data from a survey, investigating which learning effects - with regard to sustainable consumption - result from changes in the school’s learning settings, and which result from participating in bringing about these changes. Findings of the empirical works of this cumulative dissertation suggest that the students’ perception of two domains of a school’s culture of consumption are of particular relevance for their consumer learning: firstly, the extent to which the school pursues objectives of sustainable consumer education, and secondly, the extent to which the school’s espoused commitment to sustainable consumption results in actual changes in its culture of consumption. The findings further show that those students who were actively involved in the change process have the highest mean scores with respect to their perceived consumer effectiveness, their sustainably-oriented consumer behaviour and their perceived relevance of what they learned in school for everyday consumption decision. Therewith, the findings of the empirical investigations indicate that not only active participation, but already the observation of activities related to sustainable consumption at school has an influence on the development of students’ attitudes and behavioural intentions.

In light of the results of the cumulative dissertation, it can be concluded: Schools can make a pedagogically legitimate and empirically effective contribution to mastering the global consumption challenge when they systematically develop their organizational culture of consumption in a way that allows students to actively participate in change processes and to take notice of them. It is crucial in this context that they openly pursue objectives in consumer education that do not typecast students as consumers, but rather address them as consumer citizens, with the overall aim to enable and motivate them to participate in the societal discourse on sustainable consumption.

The dissertation originated from the transdisciplinary research and development project BINK (German acronym for educational institutions and sustainable consumption). The project was funded between 2008 and 2012 by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in the focal topic “From Knowledge to Action – New Paths towards Sustainable Consumption” as part of the “Social-ecological Research Programme” (SÖF).