ETHICAL-RELATIONAL REFLEXIVITY IN SUSTAINABILITY EDUCATION A CONCEPTUAL EXPLORATION OF AGENCY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND RELATIONALITY IN SCANDINAVIAN EDUCATION FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Sammanfattning

Aim: This thesis explores how agency, responsibility, relationality, and reflexivity areconceptualised within selected Scandinavian Education for SustainableDevelopment (ESD) literature in relation to late-adolescent learners and thetransition to early adulthood. It examines ethical-relational reflexivity as aconceptual lens for understanding responsible agency in sustainabilityeducation.Theory: The study draws on ESD scholarship, theories of reflexive agency, relationalperspectives, and a morphogenetic lens to examine how agency, responsibility,and reflexivity may be understood as educationally and temporally mediated.Method: The study adopts a conceptual-theoretical design grounded in abductivereasoning and conceptual synthesis. Literature was identified through aPRISMA-informed search, exploratory searching, and citation tracking. Thefinal coded dataset consisted of 17 peer-reviewed studies, which formed thebasis for the structured conceptual analysis. Five supplementary articles wereused only in the discussion chapter to situate and extend the findings. Theanalysis combined structured conceptual coding with comparativeinterpretation.Results: The analysis shows that the four core concepts are strongly present across theselected coded literature but are not consistently theorised as interconnecteddimensions. Agency is often framed through participation, action competence,student voice, and transformative capacity. Responsibility appears throughmoral concern, democratic participation, professional responsibility, justice, andfuture orientation. Relationality recurs in relation to institutions, socio-materialconditions, whole-school approaches, sustainability narratives, and human/nonhumaninterdependence. Reflexivity appears through critical thinking, dialogue,systems awareness, Bildung, and professional collaboration, but is often impliedrather than explicitly conceptualised as a mediating process. The thesiscontributes by developing ethical-relational reflexivity as an integrativeconceptual lens for understanding agency in ESD as ethically grounded,relationally aware, reflexively mediated, institutionally conditioned, andtemporally developing.