Framing Sustainable Fashion in Consumption and Youth Agency in Western ESD Research: A Critical Pedagogical Literature Review

Sammanfattning

Aim: The aim of this thesis is to critically examine how sustainable fashion consumption and young people’s roles as sustainability actors are constructed within Western Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) research, with particular attention to how responsibility, agency and participation are framed across individual and structural dimensions of sustainability transitions.Theory: The study draws on critical pedagogy, particularly the work of Paulo Freire, Gert Biesta and Henry Giroux, in combination with central frameworks within ESD, including action competence and the distinction between ESD 1 and ESD 2. Together, these perspectives provide a critical analytical framework for examining how sustainability, responsibility and youth agency are framed within educational discourses and whether these framings support adaptive or transformative approaches to sustainability education. By combining critical pedagogical perspectives with ESD frameworks, the study can analyse both how young people are positioned within sustainability education and the educational purposes these positions serve.Method: The study is conducted as a structured thematic literature review based on peer-reviewed Western ESD research on sustainable fashion consumption and youth agency. The analysis was guided by the research questions and followed an iterative thematic synthesis in which recurring constructions, framings and tensions across the literature were identified and interpreted.Results: The findings show that Western ESD research frames sustainable fashion consumption and youth agency through recurring tensions between individualised responsibility and structural understandings of sustainability transformation. Behaviour-oriented approaches tend to position young people primarily as responsible consumers expected to adapt their lifestyles through sustainable consumption practices, while competence-based and transformative perspectives emphasise democratic participation, collective agency and critical engagement with the structural conditions shaping unsustainable fashion systems. The findings further suggest that educational framings of sustainability vary in the extent to which they encourage adaptation to existing systems or support transformative engagement with broader socio-ecological change.