Conference Agenda

The 2030 Agenda positions higher education as a strategic actor in addressing the major social, economic and environmental challenges of the 21st century (Shava et al., 2023). Within this framework, universities assume the responsibility of educating critical, committed and socially responsible citizens. In response to this challenge, Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has taken on a growing role in scientific literature, emphasising the development of skills, values and forms of agency geared towards transformative action (Žalėnienė & Pereira, 2021).

Various studies indicate that, although university students tend to express positive attitudes towards sustainability, there remains a significant gap between the knowledge they have acquired and their perception of their own ability to contribute effectively to social change (Wang et al., 2022). In this context, students' perceptions play a central role in understanding their level of engagement with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (Abowardah et al., 2024). Educational and social psychology recognises that beliefs and perceptions directly influence motivation, self-efficacy and willingness to take action (Bandura, 2001; Wiyanarti & Nurjannah, 2025). Therefore, it is not enough to analyse students' level of knowledge about the SDGs; we must also understand how they interpret their personal responsibility in achieving them.

Student perceptions also act as a mediating element between the training received, the construction of personal and professional identity, and the willingness to participate in sustainability actions in various social and institutional contexts (Rashed et al., 2025). This issue is particularly relevant in the Spanish context, where the implementation of the 2030 Agenda in higher education shows uneven and heterogeneous progress between institutions and degree programmes. In this scenario, analysing the voice of students allows us to identify not only levels of awareness, but also tensions, limitations and opportunities to strengthen ESD in universities (Abowardah et al., 2024).

The notion of agency is key to understanding the role of students in sustainable development. From a theoretical perspective, agency is defined as the perceived ability of individuals to influence their environment through conscious actions, both individually and collectively (Yang et al., 2025). In the university context, this agency can manifest itself through everyday practices, participation in institutional initiatives, involvement in community projects, or various forms of social activism linked to the SDGs.

Previous studies have highlighted that students may perceive the SDGs as abstract goals that are far removed from their everyday reality (Araneo, 2023; Cachero et al., 2023). This fact fosters feelings of powerlessness or the delegation of responsibility to institutional or political actors (Shephard et al., 2015). Therefore, analysing these perceptions is key to identifying structural, cultural, and educational barriers that limit student involvement and hinder the development of truly transformative agency.

Although a considerable amount of research has examined the incorporation of the SDGs into university curricula (Leal et al., 2024), little attention has been paid to the experience and perceptions of students themselves, particularly with regard to how they perceive their capacity and responsibility to contribute to the achievement of the SDGs. Based on this framework, the following research question was formulated: How do university students perceive their ability and responsibility to contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals? In line with this question, the overall objective of this study was to analyse in depth the perceptions of Spanish university students regarding their ability and responsibility to contribute, individually, to the achievement of the SDGs. In addition, the following objectives were set:

(1) to explore how students understand their personal contribution to the SDGs and what types of actions they consider relevant; and

(2) to identify patterns of awareness, agency and perceived barriers to transformative action.

In times of multiple crises, including the climate catastrophe, a subversion of democracy, and political fragmentation and polarization (Kaftan & Bormann, 2025), the broad and complex agenda of education for sustainable development (ESD) (Stevenson, 2007) offers manifold opportunities to empower people “to contribute to a better future through mindset changes, critical reflection and building new skills” (Reynolds, 2009, p. 109). Higher education institutions (HEIs), hubs of knowledge and innovation with high societal impact, are uniquely positioned to lead change by educating future decision-makers and influencers and addressing pressing sustainability issues (Bomann et al., 2025; Sonetti et al., 2019). A novel pedagogical approach to improving teaching and learning in higher education (HE) is co-creation (Omland et al., 2025), where “staff and students work collaboratively with one another to create components of curricula and/or pedagogical approaches” (Bovill et al., 2016, p. 196). Applied to ESD, learners should thus be empowered to equally shape the content and structures of the curriculum, thereby demonstrating concrete potential for the participatory design of HE curricula (Gallou & Williams, 2023). However, traditional formats of student evaluation of teaching (SET), such as standardized course evaluation surveys, primarily aim to assess teaching quality in HE. The problem with this form of teaching evaluation lies not only in declining response rates but also in unclear motivations for participation and little evidence of impact on teaching practice (Nóvak, 2023; Blair & Noel, 2014). As co-creation formats, they therefore seem inadequate.

Against this backdrop, there is little empirical research on deliberative, non-instrumental evaluation formats in HE for ESD. Therefore, innovative approaches to foster student engagement that offer opportunities for participation in co-creation processes of curriculum design towards ESD must be developed and tested for structural implementation. A potentially suitable approach might be a student citizen assembly (SCA) that systematically gathers student perspectives and, through deliberative participation formats, provides effective impulses for further teaching and curriculum development. The idea of SCAs is based on citizen assemblies—an innovative participatory instrument that uses deliberative mini-publics with randomly selected citizens to develop courageous solutions and recommendations for complex, controversial social issues. (Goodin & Dryzek, 2006; Mathis, 2021). Applied to the approach of SCAs, randomly selected students deliberate on ideas and concepts of teaching and negotiate recommendations through discourse to develop concrete recommendations for HE curriculum development.

The idea of an SCA is now being tested within an innovative interdisciplinary module that has recently been established at a German mid-sized university. It invites all first-semester students to explore complex societal transformation processes across their disciplines—such as climate justice, digitalization, democracy, or post-growth—and challenges students to develop their capacity for orientation, judgment, and action in the face of societal uncertainty and growing complex sustainability challenges. Although based on a German case, the study addresses challenges that are widely discussed across European HE systems.

To examine how SCAs address known challenges of evaluation in HE and foster democratic participation in curriculum design, this study explores the following research question:

In what ways can deliberative SCAs contribute to transforming evaluation practices towards more democratic and sustainability-oriented curriculum design in higher education?

Sub-questions are:

• How do students experience and interpret their role within this format?
• How is participation related to prior evaluation practices and experiences?
• How does deliberation affect perceived agency and self-efficacy?

Further, it will be interesting to assess the possibilities offered by the SCA to address common challenges with SET tools, enabling evaluation and curriculum development of HE that support ESD.

Higher Education for Sustainable Development (HESD) is expected to respond to intersecting crises, including climate change, growing geopolitical tensions and social polarisation; and to re‑imagine its role in educating future change agents. At the same time, the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) is entering research, teaching and learning – reshaping conditions of knowledge production, transfer and validation. These developments fundamentally change the epistemic landscape in which sustainability-related learning and research takes place. This paper argues for greater attention to the productive yet challenging role of epistemic tensions that arise at the boundaries between academic knowledge, transformative learning, and societal practice, and that are further accentuated by AI-enabled knowledge work. It addresses the following research question: How can an AI‑epistemic competence be conceptualised as an extension of sustainability competence frameworks in the context of AI‑mediated HESD?

This paper explores these questions by bringing together interpretations of generative AI as a “surrogate knower” (Jose et al., 2025) in learning spaces, debates on knowledge homogenisation and “knowledge monopolies” (Hodel & West, 2025; Messeri & Crockett, 2024) in AI ecosystems, and research on sustainability competencies (Brundiers et al., 2021) within participatory, transformative teaching formats (Cebrián et al., 2021; Hilf, 2025; Rieckmann et al., 2024). Students may increasingly treat AI tools as central, trusted sources of knowledge, thereby shifting epistemic authority from teachers and peers to algorithms and reinforcing an automation bias that privileges certainty and linear problem‑solving (Jose et al., 2025; Yu, 2025). In parallel, ecosystems dominated by a few similarly trained language models risk knowledge narrowing when they are recursively trained on their own outputs, reducing epistemic diversity and privileging dominant perspectives. These developments intersect with broader concerns about emerging AI‑driven knowledge monopolies, in which a small number of corporate actors control critical data and knowledge infrastructures, with implications for innovation, epistemic justice and democratic con-trol (Leon & Lipuma, 2025; Messeri & Crockett, 2024).

I revisit a framework of key competencies in sustainability in higher education: Brundiers et al. present an integrated set of systems‑, futures‑, values‑, strategic‑, interpersonal, intrapersonal and implementation competencies, underpinned by basic academic competencies such as critical thinking, communication, research and data management. Yet this framework emerged prior to the rapid mainstreaming of generative AI in HESD. Building on AI literacy frameworks (Ng et al., 2021), this paper proposes an extension of HESD competencies through an additional, cross‑cutting AI‑epistemic competence. It’s defined as the ability to understand generative AI systems as epistemic actors, to interrogate their assumptions, biases and representational gaps, to situate AI‑generated outputs within plural knowledge ecologies, and to use AI in ways that strengthen rather than erode human futures thinking, problem‑solving and creativity.

Didactically, the contribution focuses on transformative learning formats, as those are widely recognised as meaningful for students’ competence development (Bremer et al., 2024). Formats like Service‑Learning (SL) connect academic learning with real‑world sustainability challenges in collaboration with community partners and thereby fosters co‑production of knowledge and bilateral knowledge transfer between universities and societal actors (Hilf & Böcher, 2024). SL enhances key sustainability competencies by engaging students in multi‑stakeholder projects, but also faces barriers such as coordination demands, institutional constraints and tensions between academic and practice logics. Generative AI introduces additional tensions: Tools can support students’ research, management and scenario work, potentially enriching co‑productive processes and enabling more inclusive, multilingual and multimodal knowledge practices; on the other hand, there is a risk that core learning processes – such as dealing with complexity, negotiating conflicting values and engaging in context‑sensitive response design – are outsourced to AI systems, thereby undermining the development of precisely those problem‑solving and creativity competencies that HESD seeks to foster.