The cluster aims to bring together pedagogical, didactic and inter- and transdisciplinary research that examines the role of education for social change and sustainable development.

With the adoption of the 2020 and 2030 agendas, the United Nations has recognised the central importance of education on the path to sustainable development. Goal 4 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) calls for high-quality education for all people. At the same time, education is anchored as a cross-cutting issue in other SDGs. In the tradition of environmental education and global learning, education for sustainable development (ESD) has developed into an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary educational concept in international and national discourse. This is intended to enable people to help shape the major transformation processes of society, deal with the dilemmas and uncertainties of sustainable development and develop skills to overcome the associated challenges.

Most recently, the Lower Saxony ESD Education Decree, a basis for schools to implement ESD in Lower Saxony, came into force in March 2021. As part of their teacher training, students should also be empowered to think and act in a more sustainable way and familiarise themselves with teaching materials that they can use in their future careers at school.

As a field of research, ESD is important for university didactics, educational research and various specialised didactics in school and extracurricular education. In a broader sense, ESD can also include concepts of non-formal and informal education. These different perspectives are also reflected in the heterogeneity of research approaches. One example of this diversity is the underlying competence models and the weighting in the interplay of subject, action and evaluation competences for teaching ESD content. At the same time, however, overarching issues can also be identified, such as the relationship between subject-specific and interdisciplinary ESD perspectives or the expansion of the normative concept of ESD to include a critical-reflective understanding.^