Communicative agency as a dimension of sustainability competence: evidence from an international higher education microcredential

Sustainability has become a central priority in global education policy following the adoption of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) (Chankseliani and McCowan, 2021). Within this framework, higher education institutions are increasingly positioned as key actors in advancing sustainable development through their roles in knowledge production, professional training and civic engagement (Chankseliani and McCowan, 2021). Universities are therefore expected not only to disseminate sustainability-related knowledge but also to cultivate the competencies required for graduates to translate the SDGs into practice across diverse social and professional contexts. In response, sustainability themes have expanded across higher education through dedicated courses, interdisciplinary modules and institutional initiatives.

Despite this expansion, a persistent limitation in sustainability education research concerns the predominance of cognitive and attitudinal approaches to learning. Many studies focus on students’ environmental knowledge, awareness and pro-sustainability orientations while giving comparatively limited attention to the communicative processes through which sustainability challenges are interpreted, debated and enacted in social contexts (Al-Nuaimi and Al-Ghamdi, 2022; Braßler and Sprenger, 2021). Empirical research consistently shows that sustainability education can improve environmental knowledge and positive attitudes without necessarily producing sustained behavioural change (Al-Naqbi and Alshannag, 2018; Braßler and Sprenger, 2021; Tawok and Saidin, 2025). This discrepancy is widely described as the knowledge–action gap, referring to situations in which individuals possess environmental concern or scientific understanding but fail to translate these orientations into consistent practice (Karvounidi et al., 2025; Kollmuss and Agyeman, 2002; Never and Albert, 2021).

Recent scholarship suggests that this gap cannot be explained solely by informational deficits but emerges through complex interactions between scientific knowledge, social norms, institutional arrangements and everyday practices (Kaaronen, 2017; Roche et al., 2022). Similar dynamics have been documented in the interface between environmental science and policy implementation, where communication failures can hinder the translation of research into practical interventions (Cockburn et al., 2016; Roche et al., 2022). Addressing such challenges requires mechanisms capable of connecting scientific expertise with local knowledge systems and facilitating sustained interaction among researchers, policymakers and diverse stakeholder groups (Mulung et al., 2025). Consequently, overcoming the knowledge–action gap increasingly involves strengthening the communicative infrastructures through which sustainability knowledge is interpreted, negotiated and coordinated in practice (Never and Albert, 2021; Pacini et al., 2025).

Across disciplines, communication is increasingly understood not merely as a supplementary skill but as a structural condition underpinning processes such as awareness-raising, stakeholder engagement, behavioural change and policy legitimation. In educational contexts, communication shapes learning environments through the interaction between educators and learners (Ninčević and Vukelić, 2019). Professional practice similarly illustrates the centrality of communication: in healthcare, for example, communicative competence influences diagnostic accuracy, patient trust and professional collaboration (Kim and Sim, 2020). These processes operate within broader social, institutional and technological infrastructures that shape how sustainability knowledge is accessed, interpreted, circulated and acted upon (Kaaronen, 2017; Never and Albert, 2021; Roche et al., 2022).

Communication also plays a decisive role in stakeholder coordination and collective action. Strategic communication planning supports organisational learning and innovation diffusion (Widén et al., 2014), while project-management research highlights communication and relationship-building as key mediators of stakeholder participation and project success (Malik et al., 2023). Comparable dynamics occur in sustainability initiatives ranging from environmental restoration to infrastructure development, where cross-sector communication fosters shared responsibility and coordinated action (Arsénio et al., 2020; Halder, 2025). Corporate sustainability strategies likewise rely on stakeholder communication to strengthen legitimacy and environmental accountability (Lyulyov et al., 2023).

Beyond these functional roles, contemporary communication theory challenges linear “transmission” models in which information simply moves from sender to receiver (Akama et al., 2016; Kanner and Wertsch, 1991). Instead, communication is increasingly conceptualised as a process of enactment, through which social actors construct meaning, negotiate responsibility and coordinate collective action (de Oliveira and Handfield, 2017). From this perspective, discourse does not merely describe sustainability initiatives but actively participates in bringing them into being by defining problems, attributing agency and legitimising particular courses of action.

If sustainability transitions depend on coordination among diverse actors, institutions and knowledge systems, then communicative competence becomes a central dimension of sustainability competence. Yet, despite this growing recognition, communication remains conceptually underdeveloped within sustainability competence frameworks. It is typically embedded implicitly within broader competencies such as collaboration or participation, but is rarely theorised as a distinct dimension of competence in its own right. Moreover, existing research has only begun to examine how such communicative capacities are operationalised and enacted in educational contexts. To address this gap, this study introduces the concept of communicative agency, understood as the capacity to discursively construct, position and mobilise actors, responsibilities and courses of action within sustainability contexts. The study does not propose communicative agency as a comprehensive solution to the knowledge–action gap, but examines it as one under-theorised communicative dimension through which sustainability knowledge may become socially actionable.

This study examines these questions within the pedagogical setting of an international microcredential focused on sustainability communication. Microcredentials – defined as records of assessed learning outcomes derived from relatively small volumes of study – have expanded rapidly across higher education systems and increasingly address themes such as climate communication, planetary health and sustainable development (Bozkurt and Brown, 2022; Capetola et al., 2022; Sargent et al., 2023). Because such programmes combine clearly defined learning outcomes, compressed instructional formats and assessment-driven design, they provide a useful context for examining how sustainability is framed pedagogically and enacted discursively.

The research problem addressed here is therefore not a general lack of communication skills, nor a comprehensive explanation of the knowledge–action gap, but the more specific question of how learners discursively construct sustainability knowledge as actionable through communication. This study aims to conceptualise and empirically examine communicative agency as a dimension of sustainability competence. It does so by analysing how students construct sustainability discourse within an international microcredential programme, focusing on how communication functions not only as a medium of expression but as a mechanism for enabling action. The article investigates how students conceptualise and perform sustainability communication within this setting. The study does not seek to determine whether communicative agency is absent from sustainability education, but to examine how this dimension can be conceptualised, operationalised and empirically observed within a specific pedagogical context.

Specifically, it addresses three research questions:

In doing so, the study contributes to sustainability education research by positioning communication as an agency-enabling dimension of sustainability competence, by offering discourse-analytical categories for examining how such agency is enacted and by showing how communication-centred microcredential design can create pedagogical conditions for students to practise sustainability-oriented communication.

Education for sustainable development (ESD) is widely understood as an effort to bridge the persistent gap between knowledge and action in addressing complex socio-ecological challenges. Within this field, sustainability competence is commonly defined as an integrated configuration of knowledge, skills and values enabling individuals to engage with and intervene in real-world sustainability problems (Wiek et al., 2011). Foundational competence frameworks have significantly shaped higher education curricula by foregrounding systems thinking, anticipatory competence, normative reasoning and collaborative problem-solving (Barth et al., 2007; Wiek et al., 2011). These competencies are conceptualised as interdependent and activated in practice as part of broader problem-solving processes oriented towards sustainability transitions. Competence-based approaches have been criticised for potentially narrowing education to measurable outcomes, individualising responsibility and underplaying the institutional, political and material conditions that shape learners’ capacity to act (Tahirsylaj and Sundberg, 2026). Within ESD, this criticism is particularly relevant because sustainability action cannot be reduced to the acquisition of individual skills or dispositions. Competence frameworks are therefore most useful when treated not as exhaustive models of action, but as heuristic tools for examining how knowledge, values, practices and contexts interact. Therefore, in the present study, communicative agency is not proposed as an additional checklist item but as a way to examine how sustainability competence becomes discursively and socially mediated.

A growing body of research also highlights persistent limitations in the capacity of such frameworks to translate sustainability awareness into sustained pro-environmental behaviour (Guerra et al., 2022; Kågström and Faith-Ell, 2025). Educational approaches centred primarily on cognitive understanding or attitudinal change often fail to generate meaningful behavioural transformation, suggesting that the relationship between knowledge and action is neither linear nor automatic. Empirical evidence further indicates that emotional engagement and contextual factors mediate this relationship, complicating models of sustainability learning based solely on rational information processing (Fuertes-Camacho et al., 2025).

In response, ESD research has increasingly drawn on transformative learning theory, which conceptualises learning as a process of revising individuals’ meaning perspectives through critical reflection and critical discourse, leading to changes in judgement and action (Hyde, 2021; Kokkos, 2022; Wang et al., 2013; Wang et al., 2019). Within sustainability education, transformative learning is used to move beyond knowledge acquisition towards shifts in assumptions, identities and action capacities required for engaging with complex global challenges (Hyde, 2021; Kokkos, 2022). However, while transformative learning provides a robust account of how learners’ perspectives change, it offers more limited insight into how such transformations are enacted within social contexts, particularly in relation to collective and coordinated forms of action.

Similarly, agency-based approaches in education conceptualise learners as capable of purposeful, self-directed action within and in relation to contextual constraints (Wehmeyer et al., 2021). These perspectives emphasise autonomy, participation and the capacity to act on knowledge, while also recognising the relational and situated nature of agency as it unfolds across temporal dimensions of past experience, present judgement and future-oriented action (Li and Ruppar, 2021). Contemporary pedagogical approaches further promote learner agency through autonomy-supportive environments, self-directed learning and participatory designs (Blaschke and Hase, 2019; Blaschke and Marin, 2020; Hamlin, 2018). However, while these frameworks provide valuable insights into the capacity for action, they offer comparatively limited conceptualisation of how such agency is constructed, expressed and negotiated in interaction.

Taken together, these perspectives reveal a critical limitation in existing approaches to sustainability competence. While current frameworks provide robust accounts of the cognitive, normative and strategic dimensions of sustainability learning, they offer a more limited understanding of how such competence becomes enacted in social practice. What remains under-theorised is how sustainability competence becomes socially actionable through communication. This limitation makes communication theoretically important, because the movement from knowledge to action depends not only on what learners understand but also on how they construct, negotiate and mobilise that understanding socially.

Building on this limitation, communication becomes central not simply as a pedagogical skill but as the social process through which sustainability meanings, responsibilities and possible actions are negotiated. Addressing complex socio-ecological challenges requires coordination among diverse actors, negotiation of competing perspectives and the construction of shared understandings that enable collective action. Communication is therefore not merely a supporting skill but a central mechanism through which sustainability processes unfold.

Traditional transmission-oriented models conceptualise communication as the transfer of information from sender to receiver. In contrast, constructivist and discourse-oriented perspectives emphasise communication as a process through which meaning, social relations and action are actively constructed. From this perspective, communication does not simply convey sustainability knowledge; it shapes how problems are defined, how responsibilities are allocated and which forms of intervention are perceived as legitimate.

The notion of communicative competence, as developed in applied linguistics, provides a foundational framework for understanding communication as a complex, context-dependent capacity (Canale, 1987; Celce-Murcia, 2007). These models conceptualise communication as the ability to use language appropriately, coherently and strategically across social contexts, integrating grammatical, sociocultural, discourse and strategic dimensions. Crucially, later developments position discourse competence as central, highlighting that meaning emerges through the interaction of linguistic resources, sociocultural knowledge and communicative intent (Celce-Murcia, 2007). Communication is thus understood as a fundamentally situated and interactional process through which actors negotiate meaning and coordinate action.

In sustainability contexts, communicative competence extends beyond linguistic proficiency to include pragmatic adaptability, intercultural sensitivity and the capacity to negotiate meaning across disciplinary and institutional boundaries (Martynova et al., 2023; Taylor, 2018; Turko et al., 2025). These capacities enable actors with different forms of expertise to align their knowledge and actions in pursuit of shared sustainability goals (Oljans and Mickelsson, 2026). Communication also entails strategic and ethical dimensions. Strategic framing influences how sustainability issues are interpreted and which policy options are perceived as viable (Bertel et al., 2021; Tabib et al., 2026), while ethical responsibility requires attention to power asymmetries, accountability and the consequences of communicative interventions (McGreavy et al., 2014; Muukkonen and Kajamaa, 2024; Verharen et al., 2014). These dimensions are increasingly recognised as essential for effective collaboration and problem-solving in sustainability initiatives (Lechuga-Jimenez et al., 2024; Niyonkuru et al., 2024).

Discourse-analytical research further demonstrates that sustainability communication is never neutral. Language actively shapes social reality by defining problems, assigning responsibility and legitimising particular forms of action (Jacobsson, 2019; Shi-xu, 2023). Discourse-analytical research has shown how public texts construct social and political actors, oppositions and legitimising narratives through recurrent linguistic and evaluative patterns (Javadinejad, 2024a, 2024b, 2024c). Analysing discourse reveals the ideological assumptions and power relations embedded in sustainability narratives across policy, media and corporate communication (de Castilho Rossoni and Lima, 2026; Ngai, 2020). A central concern in this literature is the discursive construction of agency: the ways in which communication attributes the capacity, authority or obligation to act to specific actors. Through linguistic and semiotic choices, communicators may position individuals, corporations or institutions as responsible agents or as passive subjects constrained by structural conditions (van Leeuwen, 2015; Shakya, 2026). In some cases, rhetorical strategies such as “hope discourse” may even create an appearance of agency while diffusing responsibility and delaying concrete action (Bergeå et al., 2025).

These dynamics illustrate that sustainability outcomes are shaped not only by technological or regulatory factors but also by the communicative processes through which responsibility, legitimacy and possibility are negotiated. Communication is therefore not simply a medium of interaction but a constitutive mechanism through which sustainability action is constructed and coordinated.

The preceding sections suggest the need for a construct capable of connecting sustainability competence, communicative competence and discourse-mediated agency. This is the role assigned here to communicative agency. While sustainability competence frameworks define the capacities required for action, transformative learning explains how learners’ perspectives change and agency-based approaches conceptualise the capacity for purposeful action, these perspectives do not fully account for how such capacities are enacted in social interaction. This study addresses this gap by introducing the concept of communicative agency. The concept is not proposed as a replacement for existing sustainability competence frameworks, but as a complementary dimension explaining how competencies become socially enacted through discourse.

Communicative agency refers to the capacity to discursively construct, position and mobilise actors, responsibilities and interventions within sustainability contexts. Epistemologically, the study approaches communication as a situated discursive practice through which meanings, responsibilities and possible actions are constructed, rather than as a neutral transmission channel or as a deterministic cause of behaviour change. This concept builds on three complementary theoretical traditions. Firstly, sustainability competence frameworks provide an account of the knowledge, skills and values required for engaging with complex socio-ecological challenges, but they do not fully explain how these capacities are enacted in interaction (Wiek et al., 2011). Secondly, communicative competence frameworks conceptualise communication as a context-sensitive and functional ability, but they primarily frame it as an individual capacity rather than as a mechanism of social action (Canale, 1987; Celce-Murcia, 2007). Thirdly, discourse-oriented approaches highlight how language constructs social reality and distributes agency, yet they do not explicitly connect these processes to sustainability competence or educational practice.

Communicative agency should not be understood as a fully separate construct detached from communicative competence, participation, educational agency or transformative learning. It partly overlaps with these traditions insofar as all are concerned with learners’ capacity to participate meaningfully in social action. Its specific contribution, however, lies in foregrounding the discursive processes through which such participation is made communicatively available: the construction of actors, the attribution of responsibility, the calibration of obligation and possibility and the adaptation of messages to audiences. In this sense, communicative agency is advanced as an integrative and exploratory construct rather than as a replacement for existing competence-based or agency-oriented frameworks.

Communicative agency integrates these perspectives by conceptualising communication as a mechanism through which sustainability competence becomes socially actionable. It foregrounds the role of discourse in enabling individuals not only to understand sustainability challenges but to participate in their social negotiation and transformation. In this sense, communication is not an auxiliary skill but a constitutive dimension of sustainability competence. While communicative competence traditionally refers to the ability to communicate effectively across social contexts (Canale and Swain, 1980; Celce-Murcia, 2007), communicative agency refers more specifically to the capacity to discursively construct actors, position responsibility and mobilise sustainability-oriented action. Similarly, whereas agency-based approaches in education often focus on learner autonomy, intentionality or self-directed participation (Blaschke and Hase, 2019; Wehmeyer et al., 2021), the present study foregrounds the discursive dimension through which agency is enacted linguistically within sustainability communication practices. In this sense, communicative agency does not replace existing sustainability competence frameworks or communicative competence models, but complements them by theorising how sustainability knowledge becomes socially actionable through discourse. Communicative agency is therefore not intended to replace broader behavioural, pedagogical or institutional accounts of sustainability action, but to clarify the discursive processes through which action is framed, attributed and made communicatively available.

This study does not simply argue that communication is important for sustainability education. Rather, it reconceptualises communication as a mechanism through which knowledge, transformation and agency are translated into collective action. By doing so, it extends existing competence frameworks and provides a more precise account of how sustainability learning becomes operational in real-world contexts.

Empirically, communicative agency is operationalised through four interrelated discursive dimensions: the construction of actors capable of intervention, the attribution of responsibility across individual and institutional levels, modalisation as the linguistic calibration of obligation and possibility and audience positioning as the adaptation of discourse to specific social contexts. These dimensions allow for the systematic analysis of how sustainability discourse constructs agency and enables – or constrains – action within specific communicative contexts.

On this basis, the present study conceptualises communication education not as an auxiliary component of ESD but as a central dimension of sustainability competence. By examining how students conceptualise and enact sustainability discourse within an international microcredential programme, the study investigates how communicative practices contribute to transforming sustainability knowledge into collective capacity for social action.

This study adopts a qualitative exploratory case study design supported by descriptive survey data. The primary aim is not to measure learning outcomes quantitatively, but to examine how sustainability is discursively constructed when communication is positioned as a central component of sustainability education. A case study approach is appropriate given the bounded nature of the pedagogical setting and the focus on analysing communicative practices within a specific educational intervention. The study is grounded in interpretive discourse analysis, which enables the examination of how meaning, agency and action are constructed through language. In line with the study’s theoretical framework, this approach allows for the analysis of communicative agency as it emerges in students’ sustainability discourse. Accordingly, the study is not designed as an evaluation of the overall presence or absence of communication training in sustainability education, but as an exploratory analysis of how communicative agency is enacted through student-produced sustainability discourse. Also, the purpose of the analysis is not to demonstrate that communication training is universally necessary for sustainability education, but to examine how communicative agency is discursively enacted within a bounded pedagogical case.

The study was conducted within an international higher education microcredential course titled English Communication for Sustainable Development, offered within the EU-CONEXUS framework and awarded by Universidad Católica de Valencia. The course was designed as a project-based and communication-centred learning environment, consistent with pedagogical approaches that position sustainability learning as participatory, interdisciplinary and oriented towards authentic problem-solving. In this design, the final campaign project functioned not only as an assessment task but as a pedagogical space in which students could practise the communicative genres associated with sustainability engagement, stakeholder communication and public-facing advocacy.

The course responds to the growing need for graduates who are not only proficient users of English as a lingua franca but also capable of communicating complex sustainability challenges in meaningful, ethical and socially engaged ways. Pedagogically, it adopts a content-and-language integrated approach in which sustainability functions both as the thematic focus of the curriculum and as the communicative purpose of language use. English is therefore treated not as an abstract linguistic system but as a practical tool for participating in global sustainability discourse aligned with the United Nations SDGs.

Instruction follows a modular structure organised around four thematic areas: social aspects of sustainability, sustainability and inequality, environmental sustainability and international cooperation. Each module combines disciplinary input with communicative practice through reading and listening materials, SDG-related vocabulary development, focused grammar activities and guided written production. This structure provides both conceptual and linguistic scaffolding, enabling students to engage progressively with increasingly complex sustainability issues while developing their communicative competence.

Synchronous sessions play an important role in supporting collaborative learning and project development. The initial session introduces course objectives, collaborative expectations and the project-based learning approach. Subsequent sessions combine feedback on previous tasks, interactive discussion of sustainability topics and structured time for group work, fostering sustained engagement and iterative development of ideas.

The central pedagogical element of the course is the final group project, Our SDG Communication Campaign. Students work in international, interdisciplinary teams to design a multimodal communication campaign addressing a sustainability challenge linked to one or more SDGs. The project simulates the development of a public-facing campaign aimed at a defined audience and requires students to identify stakeholders, frame problems, propose solutions and select appropriate communicative strategies and formats. Outputs typically include written texts, oral presentations and digital artefacts designed for external communication.

This pedagogical design provides a particularly suitable context for examining communicative agency. By requiring students to construct sustainability narratives for specific audiences, attribute responsibility to different actors and articulate actionable responses to complex problems, the course situates communication as a form of social action rather than as the transmission of information. Students are not only expected to demonstrate understanding of sustainability issues, but to position themselves as communicators capable of influencing how these issues are interpreted and addressed.

In this sense, the project-based tasks embedded in the course require students to enact communicative agency. Through their campaigns, learners must discursively construct actors, negotiate responsibility, frame problems and solutions and orient their communication towards particular audiences. The resulting artefacts therefore provide a rich empirical basis for analysing how sustainability knowledge is transformed into communicative action within an educational setting. These artefacts can therefore be understood as instances of applied discourse, providing direct evidence of how communicative agency is enacted in pedagogical contexts.

Across two course editions, 48 undergraduate students participated in the microcredential, with 24 students enrolled in each edition. The course lasted five weeks and corresponded to 1 ECTS credit. Instruction followed a hybrid format consisting of ten hours of synchronous teaching delivered across five two-hour sessions, combined with asynchronous activities and independent work completed through the course platform. English functioned as the lingua franca of instruction and communication. While students’ levels of English proficiency varied, all participants were expected to engage in spoken and written academic communication throughout the course.

Two sources of data were analysed.

The first consisted of a diagnostic survey administered during the initial session of each course edition. Approximately half of the enrolled students completed the survey, resulting in a data set of 24 responses. The survey collected demographic information, explored students’ prior familiarity with the SDGs and examined their perceptions of the role of communication in sustainable development. It included Likert-scale items assessing the perceived importance of communication across five SDG-related domains – awareness and education, stakeholder participation, behavioural change, policy implementation and transparency – as well as self-assessment items related to communicative competence. An open-ended question invited students to describe communicative competencies they believed they already possessed. The survey was used as a diagnostic and contextual instrument, intended to capture students’ initial conceptualisations of sustainability communication. It was not designed as a pre-test for measuring learning gains, but rather to provide contextual insight that supports the interpretation of the discourse data.

The second and primary data set consisted of the final group projects produced during the course. Students worked in international groups to design multimodal sustainability communication campaigns addressing a specific SDG-related challenge. Across the two course editions, eight campaigns were produced and analysed. Each campaign included a short oral presentation and a written campaign toolkit comprising a title and slogan, identification of target SDGs, audience analysis, visual campaign materials, a written pitch, a social media caption and three calls to action. For the purposes of this study, analysis focused primarily on the written components of the campaign toolkits – particularly the pitch texts, slogans, calls to action and audience analysis sections – which provided the most comparable and linguistically rich material for discourse analysis.

Data were analysed using an interpretive qualitative discourse analysis approach informed by traditions in critical discourse analysis (CDA) and discourse-oriented educational research (Fairclough, 2013; Gee, 2014; Wodak and Meyer, 2015). The analysis focused on how sustainability issues were linguistically framed and how agency, responsibility, obligation and action were constructed within students’ multimodal campaigns. Consistent with discourse-theoretical perspectives, language was approached not as a neutral medium for transmitting information but as a social practice through which meanings, identities and forms of action are produced and negotiated (Fairclough, 2013; Van Dijk, 2015). The analytical process involved repeated close readings of the campaign materials to identify recurring discursive patterns and rhetorical strategies across cases. Rather than applying a fully predetermined coding scheme, analytical categories were developed iteratively through engagement with the data, combining inductive pattern identification with theoretically informed interpretation (Braun and Clarke, 2021). Four interrelated analytical dimensions guided the analysis:

1. the construction of agency, referring to how actors capable of intervention were represented;

2. the attribution of responsibility across individual, institutional and collective levels;

3. the use of modalisation and evaluative language to calibrate obligation, urgency, and feasibility; and

4. audience positioning and communicative adaptation across different social contexts.

Cross-case comparison was then used to identify broader tendencies in how students discursively enacted sustainability-oriented communication within the pedagogical setting. Analytical consistency was strengthened through repeated re-reading, iterative refinement of categories and systematic comparison across campaign artefacts.

The analytical process followed an iterative and systematic procedure. Firstly, all campaign texts were read multiple times to develop an overall understanding of recurring themes and discursive patterns. The initial coding focused on identifying how sustainability issues, actors, responsibilities and possible actions were represented. Analytical categories were then refined through iterative comparison across the data set, combining inductive pattern identification with the theoretical framework developed above. Finally, patterns were compared across the eight campaigns to identify recurring and contrasting ways of constructing sustainability discourse. In line with the study’s conceptualisation of communicative agency, particular attention was paid to the construction of actors capable of intervention, the attribution of responsibility across individual and institutional levels, modalisation as the linguistic expression of obligation and possibility and audience positioning as the adaptation of communication to specific target groups. Representative examples were selected to illustrate these patterns and support the qualitative interpretation of the data.

The researcher was also the instructor responsible for delivering the course. This dual role was acknowledged as a potential source of bias. To mitigate this, analysis of student materials was conducted only after the completion of course assessment, ensuring that research activities did not influence grading decisions. Analytical rigour was supported through the use of iterative coding and repeated comparison across cases, enhancing the transparency and consistency of the interpretive process. All data were anonymised prior to analysis, and students were informed that anonymised coursework might be used for research purposes. Participation in the study had no impact on students’ academic evaluation. This positionality was treated as an interpretive condition of the study rather than as a claim to neutral detachment; accordingly, the analysis focused on documented textual artefacts and explicitly defined analytical dimensions rather than on unstructured impressions of student performance.

The results draw on insights from the diagnostic survey administered at the start of the course and from the discourse analysis of students’ final sustainability communication campaigns. Together, these data sets illuminate how students initially conceptualised the relationship between communication and sustainability and how they subsequently enacted sustainability discourse when designing multimodal campaigns. The analysis is organised around the four discourse-analytical dimensions through which communicative agency was operationalised: actor representation, attribution of responsibility, modalisation and audience positioning. Consistent with the study’s exploratory design, the analysis does not seek to validate communicative agency as a distinct or generalisable competence construct. Rather, it offers an interpretive account of how students discursively constructed sustainability as actionable within a bounded pedagogical context, and relates these patterns to recent literature on sustainability competence, sustainability communication and discourse-mediated agency.

Survey responses revealed a highly heterogeneous cohort in terms of disciplinary background and prior exposure to sustainability frameworks. Participants came from a wide range of academic fields, including natural sciences, engineering, social sciences, education, health sciences and creative disciplines. Programmes mentioned by respondents included crop science, biotechnology, marine sciences, food science, civil engineering, computer science, psychology, business administration, teacher education, digital marketing, graphic design and translation studies. Institutionally, students were affiliated with several European universities, including the Agricultural University of Athens, Frederick University, Klaipėda University, the University of Zadar, the Catholic University of Valencia and the Technical University of Civil Engineering of Bucharest. This disciplinary and institutional diversity created a learning environment in which sustainability communication was necessarily negotiated across distinct epistemic traditions and professional orientations.

Students’ prior familiarity with the SDGs varied considerably. Some respondents reported little or no prior engagement with the SDGs, describing only minimal exposure through school-level geography classes or isolated university modules. Others indicated more systematic encounters with sustainability frameworks through degree programmes in areas such as business administration, agricultural sciences or natural resource management, as well as through extracurricular initiatives such as Erasmus + projects or EU-CONEXUS activities. Several respondents demonstrated relatively detailed knowledge of specific SDGs, particularly those related to food security, environmental protection and climate action. Between these poles, many students described partial familiarity with the SDGs, recognising them as a set of global goals addressing issues such as poverty, inequality and climate change but indicating that the topic had not been extensively addressed in their degree programmes. Overall, the responses revealed a cohort entering the course with uneven sustainability literacy, ranging from near-novice awareness to discipline-specific familiarity.

Despite this variability in prior knowledge, students overwhelmingly emphasised the importance of communication for achieving sustainable development. Communication was consistently described as essential for raising awareness, disseminating knowledge, coordinating stakeholders and motivating collective action. Respondents frequently linked effective communication to the success of the SDGs, noting that sustainability initiatives would have limited impact if they were not communicated clearly to diverse publics. Several students also emphasised the need for intercultural sensitivity and audience adaptation, highlighting the importance of tailoring sustainability messages to different social and cultural contexts.

Likert-scale responses (Figure 1) reinforced this strong normative commitment to communication. Across five SDG-related domains – awareness and education, stakeholder participation, behavioural change, policy implementation and transparency – students rated communication as highly important, with most responses concentrated in the upper end of the scale. Awareness and education received the strongest endorsement, suggesting that students most intuitively associated communication with the dissemination of information and learning processes. Transparency and accountability also received high ratings, indicating recognition of communication’s role in governance and institutional legitimacy. Slightly greater variation appeared in domains such as stakeholder participation and policy processes, where some respondents expressed uncertainty about how communication operates within complex institutional environments.

In contrast to this strong normative endorsement, students’ self-assessments of their own communicative knowledge and competence were more cautious. Across the five domains, most respondents located themselves in the middle of the scale, reporting only partial familiarity with the communicative strategies required for sustainability work. While many students expressed relatively greater confidence in awareness-raising contexts, they reported greater uncertainty regarding stakeholder engagement, behavioural change communication and policy-oriented discourse. These responses suggest that students recognised communication as central to sustainability processes but felt less certain about how such communication operates in practice.

Open-ended responses further illustrated this pattern. Some students described communicative strengths such as the ability to explain complex issues clearly, adapt messages for different audiences or engage in cross-cultural dialogue. Others emphasised interpersonal skills including listening, teamwork and empathy, often drawing on experiences from group projects or volunteer activities. However, many respondents expressed uncertainty about their communicative capabilities, particularly in relation to formal or institutional communication contexts. Several students noted difficulties with specialised sustainability vocabulary or persuasive speaking, while others indicated that they would be better able to identify relevant competencies if provided with explicit frameworks.

These findings show that students strongly recognised the importance of communication but had a more limited operational understanding of communication as a mechanism of action. This pattern aligns with recent research indicating that learners may endorse sustainability values while lacking confidence in the practical and participatory capacities required to translate those values into action (Bianchi et al., 2022; Martínez-Agut et al., 2025). The diagnostic data therefore suggest a gap not in concern for sustainability, but in the operationalisation of communication for sustainability action. This baseline helps interpret how communicative agency developed throughout the course.

Analysis of the final multimodal campaigns reveals that students consistently framed sustainability as a problem of distributed agency enacted through discourse. Across campaigns, linguistic choices – particularly grammatical subjects, attribution of responsibility and calls to action – played a central role in defining who could act, who should act and at what scale sustainability interventions ought to occur.

A recurring pattern involved the movement from abstract global collectives to more concrete, situated actors. Many campaigns opened with expansive formulations invoking subjects such as “we,” “humanity” or “society”, framing sustainability as a shared planetary challenge. These formulations constructed issues such as climate change, gender inequality or unsustainable consumption as problems transcending national and sectoral boundaries and invited audiences to imagine themselves as members of a global moral community. As campaigns progressed, however, responsibility was typically redistributed to more specific actors. Education-oriented projects, for instance, assigned responsibility to teachers, schools and policymakers through calls to reform curricula or promote inclusive educational practices. Campaigns addressing sustainable consumption often shifted agency towards individual citizens and local economic actors, encouraging audiences to support local producers, reduce plastic use or adopt more responsible purchasing habits.

This movement from diffuse to situated agency was discursively significant. While global collectives established moral urgency, they risked dispersing responsibility across an undefined multitude. The subsequent specification of actors therefore functioned to concretise responsibility by anchoring sustainability action in recognisable social roles and institutions. This pattern reflects communicative agency through the discursive localisation of responsibility and intervention capacity. Rather than treating sustainability as an abstract global condition alone, students increasingly translated broad sustainability concerns into actionable roles embedded within identifiable institutional and social contexts.

Campaigns also revealed tensions between individualised and institutionalised models of responsibility. Some projects foregrounded everyday behavioural change, framing sustainability as the cumulative outcome of personal decisions regarding consumption, waste or lifestyle. Other campaigns emphasised structural reform, invoking ministries, schools, international organisations and community associations as the primary agents of change. Several campaigns combined these orientations, juxtaposing grassroots engagement with institutional intervention. This pattern reflects communicative agency through the construction and distribution of actors and responsibility. Students used discourse to move from abstract problem framing to the identification of actionable agents, demonstrating an emerging capacity to position audiences – and themselves – as participants in sustainability processes, while also revealing tensions between individual and structural models of action. The coexistence of individualised and institutional constructions of responsibility further illustrates communicative agency as a negotiated and multi-scalar process. Students did not simply reproduce a single model of sustainability action, but discursively coordinated different levels of intervention within broader sustainability narratives.

This finding aligns with recent research on sustainability agency and responsibility, which shows that agency is shaped not only by individual intention but also by the discursive and structural conditions through which actors are positioned as capable of action (Bergeå et al., 2025; Salovaara and Hagolani-Albov, 2024). The campaigns therefore provide evidence of how students began to distribute responsibility across citizens, institutions and collective actors, while also revealing the persistent tension between individualised and structural models of sustainability action.

Beyond defining who acts, students’ campaigns calibrated how sustainability action should be understood through modal language, evaluative expressions and temporal framing.

High-obligation modal forms such as must, need to and cannot were frequently used to frame sustainability as an ethical necessity rather than a voluntary choice. These forms positioned audiences as morally accountable actors. However, such imperatives were often balanced with inclusive constructions such as we can or let’s, which softened directive force and promoted a sense of collective participation.

Temporal framing further contributed to the persuasive structure of the campaigns. References to the year 2030, future generations or accelerating environmental degradation constructed sustainability as urgent and time-sensitive. Importantly, urgency was rarely presented in isolation. In many cases, crisis narratives were paired with concrete and achievable actions – such as attending workshops, supporting local initiatives or adopting specific practices – thereby linking urgency with feasibility.

Students also engaged in what can be described as feasibility management. Complex sustainability challenges were broken down into smaller, actionable steps. Conditional constructions (e.g. if communities work together, when schools adopt new practices) framed sustainability transitions as plausible outcomes contingent on coordinated action. Existing institutional structures – such as schools, municipalities or NGOs – were often invoked as platforms for implementation, creating a layered architecture of action from individual behaviour to systemic change.

This pattern demonstrates communicative agency through modalisation and action framing. Students did not merely describe sustainability problems; they constructed pathways for action by calibrating obligation, urgency and feasibility. Through these discursive strategies, sustainability was rendered actionable rather than abstract, demonstrating how communication functions as a mechanism for translating knowledge into potential intervention. In this sense, communicative agency emerged through students’ capacity to transform sustainability discourse into strategically calibrated forms of action-oriented communication.

Such modal and temporal framing is significant because sustainability communication often depends on balancing urgency with feasibility. Recent climate communication research suggests that messages framed through threat, distance or urgency may motivate attention, but can also produce disengagement if they are not connected to attainable forms of response (de Graaf et al., 2024; Huang and Guo, 2024). The students’ campaigns therefore show an emerging capacity to construct sustainability action as both ethically necessary and practically possible.

A defining feature of the campaigns was their explicit orientation towards specific audiences. Rather than addressing a generic public, students identified target groups such as students, teachers, parents, consumers or small business owners and adapted their communication strategies accordingly.

Campaigns addressing institutional actors, such as educators or policymakers, frequently adopted formal registers and policy-oriented language, aligning with recognised professional genres. In contrast, campaigns targeting younger audiences or social media users employed informal tone, humour or emotionally engaging narratives. This variation indicates an awareness that effective sustainability communication depends on audience expectations and communicative context.

Multimodality played a key role in reinforcing these strategies. Visual elements such as posters, infographics, slogans and hashtags condensed complex sustainability narratives into accessible and shareable formats. These elements often anchored abstract SDG themes in everyday contexts – such as classrooms or local markets – making sustainability issues more tangible and relatable.

Several campaigns also demonstrated sensitivity to intercultural communication. References to diversity, inclusion and cross-border collaboration reflected the transnational composition of the course and the global nature of sustainability challenges. Students adapted their messages to resonate across cultural contexts, suggesting an emerging awareness of communication as situated within plural social environments.

This pattern reflects communicative agency through audience positioning and strategic adaptation. Students demonstrated the ability to tailor discourse to specific audiences, aligning communicative choices with intended effects. This audience-oriented adaptation connects the findings to recent sustainability communication and stakeholder engagement research, in which effective communication depends not only on message accuracy but also on the capacity to align discourse with audience expectations, communication platforms and intended public response (Jha and Verma, 2023; Shetty and Nayak, 2025). The campaigns, therefore, suggest that students were beginning to move beyond generic awareness-raising towards targeted communicative intervention.

Taken together, the findings indicate a shift from abstract understandings of communication towards its enactment as a form of social action. While survey responses revealed strong normative beliefs about the importance of communication, the campaign projects demonstrate how students operationalised this understanding through discourse. Across the four analytical dimensions – construction of actors, attribution of responsibility, modalisation and audience positioning – students consistently engaged in the discursive work of making sustainability actionable. Communication was not treated as the transmission of information, but as the design of interventions aimed at shaping how problems are understood and addressed. These findings illustrate the emergence of communicative agency as students moved from recognising the importance of communication to actively constructing sustainability discourse. At the same time, the persistence of tensions – such as the balance between individual and structural responsibility or between urgency and feasibility – highlights that communicative agency remains partial and negotiated rather than fully stabilised. This indicates the emergence of communicative agency as a developing and situated capacity.

These patterns resonate with recent work on sustainability competences and sustainability discourse, which increasingly emphasise that sustainability learning must be enacted through participatory, communicative and context-sensitive practices rather than reduced to knowledge acquisition alone (Leal Filho et al., 2025; Nervino et al., 2024). However, the findings should be interpreted as exploratory: they demonstrate how students constructed sustainability as actionable through discourse, rather than providing definitive evidence that communicative agency constitutes a fully separate or generalisable competence dimension.

Building on the empirical patterns discussed in the preceding subsections, this section situates the findings within broader debates on the knowledge–action gap, sustainability competence, sustainability communication and higher education pedagogy. The aim is not to claim that communicative agency resolves the knowledge–action gap, but to clarify how the findings contribute to an exploratory understanding of the communicative and discursive dimensions through which sustainability competence may become socially actionable.

Research in sustainability education and environmental psychology has long documented a persistent discrepancy between individuals’ environmental knowledge and their everyday practices, commonly described as the knowledge–action gap or belief–action gap (Grandin et al., 2022; Kollmuss and Agyeman, 2002). Early explanatory models conceptualised behaviour change as a largely linear process in which information acquisition leads to awareness, attitude formation and eventually action – an assumption often described as the information deficit model (Kollmuss and Agyeman, 2002). However, extensive empirical research has demonstrated the limitations of this rationalist approach, showing that increased knowledge alone rarely produces consistent pro-environmental behaviour (Karvounidi et al., 2025; Kollmuss and Agyeman, 2002). While subsequent research has expanded explanatory frameworks to include cognitive, affective and structural factors, this study argues that the knowledge–action gap also contains an important communicative dimension that remains comparatively under-theorised. In this sense, the study aligns with broader scholarship examining how sustainability competencies become operationalised through behavioural, organisational and communicative processes rather than through knowledge acquisition alone. From this perspective, the challenge lies not only in what individuals know or feel, but in their capacity to discursively construct sustainability as actionable – defining actors, assigning responsibility and mobilising audiences towards intervention. Communicative agency should therefore be understood as a partial and situated mechanism rather than a comprehensive solution to the knowledge–action gap.

Subsequent research has therefore expanded explanatory frameworks to include motivational, emotional and structural factors shaping environmental conduct. Behavioural theories highlight the role of values, intentions and normative pressures (Lin et al., 2026), while capability-based models conceptualise behaviour as emerging from the interaction of psychological capacity, opportunity structures and motivational drivers (Buckel et al., 2024; Kaaronen, 2017). Parallel strands of scholarship emphasise affective dynamics such as guilt, hope or moral pride (Lagomarsino and Lemarié, 2024; Nielsen et al., 2024; Niu et al., 2025; Wang et al., 2020), as well as practice-based approaches that locate behaviour within broader social routines, infrastructures and cultural norms (Yang et al., 2025). ESD frameworks similarly emphasise the interaction of cognitive, affective and behavioural dimensions within sustainability competence (Ding et al., 2022).

Across these diverse traditions, however, the communicative processes through which knowledge, norms, emotions and practices circulate remain comparatively under-theorised. Behavioural interventions such as nudges rely heavily on framing and social-norm messaging (Falcone and Fiorentino, 2025; Sattar et al., 2025), while research on science–policy interfaces identifies translation failures and weak dialogue between scientific and policy communities as major contributors to the persistence of knowledge–action gaps (Albris et al., 2020; Scuttari et al., 2025). Calls for collaborative knowledge brokerage and co-production likewise emphasise the importance of communication infrastructures that enable dialogue and collective sense-making (Nyboer et al., 2021; Roche et al., 2022).

The present study contributes to this literature by reframing the knowledge–action gap not solely as a psychological or structural deficit but as a communicative problem amenable to educational intervention. Diagnostic survey data showed that students entered the microcredential with strong normative endorsement of communication’s importance for sustainability but limited confidence in their ability to operationalise such communication across governance, participation or behaviour-change contexts. The final campaign artefacts, however, demonstrated how students began to construct sustainability action discursively by specifying actors, calibrating obligation and feasibility and adapting messages for particular audiences. These findings suggest that movement from knowledge towards action is mediated not only by attitudes or motivations but also by the capacity to frame responsibility, stage interventions and mobilise publics rhetorically.

This interpretation resonates with contemporary science-communication scholarship, which has shifted away from deficit models towards dialogic and participatory frameworks (Simis et al., 2016; Suldovsky, 2016; Tsurkan, 2025). Public-engagement approaches emphasise two-way communication, trust-building and citizen participation in knowledge production rather than one-directional transmission (Hu, 2024; Pearce et al., 2015; Seethaler et al., 2019). Similarly, citizen science and co-production models conceptualise publics as epistemic partners whose participation reshapes research agendas and implementation pathways (Den Broeder et al., 2018; Roque et al., 2024; Vakhrameeva, 2023; Vohland et al., 2021). Viewed in this light, the students’ campaigns can be understood as early forms of dialogic sustainability communication in which learners experimented with stakeholder identification, audience adaptation and action-oriented messaging. The microcredential therefore functioned not simply as a vehicle for transmitting SDG knowledge but as a pedagogical space where students rehearsed the communicative practices through which sustainability transitions are enacted.

These findings also speak to ongoing debates about sustainability competence within ESD. Competence frameworks typically conceptualise sustainability expertise as an integration of systems-thinking, anticipatory, normative, strategic and interpersonal capacities (Alm et al., 2021; Singer-Brodowski et al., 2026; Thomas and Millar, 2016; Wiek et al., 2011). While communication often appears within such models as part of collaboration or leadership skills, discourse itself – the linguistic and semiotic processes through which problems are framed and actions legitimised – remains comparatively under-theorised.

The findings suggest that communicative agency constitutes a crucial dimension of sustainability competence. Students’ campaigns operationalised systems thinking by linking consumption practices, institutional structures and policy frameworks across scales; anticipatory competence through temporal projections towards 2030 and intergenerational responsibility; normative competence through ethical appeals; and strategic competence through structured intervention proposals. Communication thus functioned as the medium through which sustainability competencies became performable.

Insights from communicative competence theory help illuminate this process. Classical models in applied linguistics conceptualise communication as comprising grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic capacities enabling speakers to act effectively in social contexts (Canale and Swain, 1980; Celce-Murcia, 2007; Scarcella et al., 1990). Strategic competence, in particular, concerns speakers’ ability to pursue communicative goals and adapt discourse to audiences (Scarcella et al., 1990; Xin, 2007). In sustainability contexts, this aligns closely with the notion of strategic competence articulated in sustainability education literature (Beagon et al., 2023; Chaikovska, 2026; Wiek et al., 2011). The campaigns analysed here illustrate how these communicative resources are mobilised in practice through audience analysis, multimodal messaging and intervention-oriented discourse.

From a sociolinguistic perspective, such practices can be understood as forms of discursive agency. Speakers enact agency through linguistic choices – register, stance and framing – while negotiating the institutional and ideological constraints shaping what can be said (Jaffe, 2010; Tseng, 2021; Zimman, 2016). Students’ oscillation between individual and institutional responsibility or between moral urgency and pragmatic feasibility, reflects precisely such discursive navigation within competing sustainability narratives. CDA and positioning theory further emphasise how discourse distributes roles, rights and responsibilities among actors (Farrelly, 2019; Van Dijk, 2015; van Leeuwen, 2015; Yip and Kong, 2025). When students positioned teachers as change agents, consumers as moral actors or governments as guarantors of equity, they were not merely describing sustainability governance but performing it discursively.

At the same time, these findings highlight the limits and ambivalences of communicative agency. While discourse enables the construction of action, it does not guarantee its realisation. Communicative interventions may oversimplify complex systemic challenges, overemphasise individual responsibility or rely on persuasive strategies that raise ethical concerns, particularly in relation to behavioural nudging and manipulation. Moreover, the capacity to enact communicative agency is unevenly distributed, shaped by linguistic proficiency, institutional positioning and access to communicative platforms. Communicative agency should therefore be understood as a partial and situated mechanism rather than a comprehensive solution to the knowledge–action gap. Material infrastructures, institutional constraints, economic conditions and political structures continue to shape the possibilities and limits of sustainability action.

Beyond theoretical implications for sustainability competence, the findings also contribute to debates surrounding microcredentials in higher education. Policy discourse frequently frames microcredentials primarily as instruments for enhancing employability and labour-market responsiveness (Bonnard, 2025; Handley, 2018). Such perspectives reflect broader neoliberal transformations of higher education that emphasise marketable skills and workforce preparation (Olssen and Peters, 2005), often prompting criticism that short-format credentials risk narrowing the civic purposes of education (Wilkinson and Wilkinson, 2023).

The present case challenges and extends these interpretations. Rather than functioning solely as vehicles for discrete skill acquisition, the sustainability microcredential analysed here operated as a pedagogical laboratory for sustainability discourse. Through project-based learning, authentic assessment and multimodal communication tasks, students engaged with the genres and rhetorical dilemmas characteristic of sustainability governance and public advocacy. This pedagogical configuration aligns closely with traditions of problem-based learning and authentic assessment (Goodey et al., 2025).

The multilingual design of the course also intersects with debates surrounding CLIL and EMI. While the course may also be interpreted through an ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) perspective due to its multilingual and transnational composition, EMI is foregrounded here because the programme was institutionally organised around English-medium instruction. Delivered in English to a transnational cohort, the course required students to mobilise disciplinary knowledge and communicative resources simultaneously. The campaign project approximated what has been described as a “CLIL-ised EMI” configuration (Hu, 2023), integrating subject learning with explicit communicative production rather than treating language merely as a medium of instruction. This interpretation is also consistent with recent CLIL-oriented work highlighting the value of multimodal, content-and-language integrated pedagogies for connecting disciplinary learning with communicative production (Ramírez-Aroca and Javadinejad, 2026).

Beyond the immediate pedagogical setting, these findings also carry broader implications for how higher education institutions conceptualise sustainability competence within increasingly complex governance environments. Universities are no longer positioned solely as sites of knowledge transmission, but as actors participating in sustainability transitions through stakeholder engagement, public communication, interdisciplinary collaboration and civic coordination. From this perspective, communicative agency may be understood not merely as an educational outcome, but as a capacity increasingly required for participation in sustainability governance across institutional, professional and public contexts. The findings therefore suggest that sustainability-oriented higher education may benefit from treating communication not as a peripheral soft skill, but as a strategic infrastructure through which sustainability knowledge becomes socially actionable across scales.

More broadly, the course design resonates with situated learning theory, which conceptualises learning as participation in communities of practice (Brown et al., 1989; Lave and Wenger, 1991). Through campaign development and public-facing advocacy tasks, students engaged in forms of legitimate peripheral participation in sustainability discourse communities. Such pedagogical arrangements allowed learners to experiment with advocacy genres, audience targeting and governance narratives under pedagogical protection before encountering these practices in professional contexts (Bell et al., 2013). This study contributes to sustainability education research in three key ways. Firstly, it extends existing sustainability competence frameworks by identifying communicative agency as a distinct dimension through which competencies become socially actionable. Secondly, it integrates insights from communicative competence and discourse theory to provide a more precise account of how sustainability knowledge is translated into intervention-oriented practice. Thirdly, it demonstrates empirically how pedagogical designs centred on communication can create conditions for the enactment of this agency.

Taken together, these findings suggest that ESD curricula may benefit from positioning communication not as a peripheral skill but as a central pedagogical infrastructure for sustainability learning. Communication-centred tasks such as campaign design enable students to enact multiple sustainability competencies simultaneously by linking systems analysis, ethical reasoning and strategic intervention within concrete communicative practices. This moves beyond viewing communication as a support skill, positioning it instead as a mechanism through which sustainability competence becomes performable. These implications should nevertheless be interpreted in light of the study’s exploratory, single-case nature. The findings clarify how communicative agency can be observed within one pedagogical setting, but they do not establish its transferability across educational, organisational or cultural contexts. These issues are addressed in the following section.

As an exploratory case study conducted within a single microcredential programme, this research does not aim to produce statistically generalisable claims about sustainability education. Rather, its contribution lies in generating theoretically informed insights into the communicative processes through which sustainability competence may be enacted in pedagogical contexts. In line with qualitative research traditions, the study is oriented towards analytical generalisation, where findings contribute to the refinement of conceptual frameworks – particularly the notion of communicative agency – rather than to population-level representation. Therefore, several limitations warrant consideration.

Firstly, the study is based on a relatively small sample drawn from a specific pedagogical context. The microcredential’s international, interdisciplinary and voluntary nature introduces a degree of self-selection bias, as participants may already possess higher levels of motivation or interest in sustainability and communication than the broader student population. As a result, the communicative practices observed may not be fully representative of more heterogeneous or less self-selected educational settings.

Secondly, the findings are shaped by the bounded institutional and pedagogical context in which the study was conducted. The multilingual composition of the cohort, the use of English as a lingua franca and the campaign-based assessment design all influenced the forms of discourse produced. Different institutional environments, disciplinary configurations or language policies may generate alternative patterns of communicative practice. Comparative research across educational contexts would therefore be valuable in examining how communicative agency is enacted under varying conditions.

Thirdly, the dual role of the researcher as course instructor introduces potential limitations related to researcher positionality. Although measures were taken to mitigate bias – such as conducting analysis after grading and anonymising data – the interpretive nature of discourse analysis means that analytical choices are inevitably shaped by the researcher’s theoretical orientation and pedagogical involvement. Future studies could strengthen analytical robustness through collaborative coding, inter-rater validation or independent replication.

Fourthly, the study focuses on student-produced artefacts as outcomes of learning rather than on the interactional processes through which these artefacts were developed. As such, it captures communicative performances but not the full range of collaborative, dialogic and iterative practices that underpin them. Ethnographic or longitudinal designs incorporating classroom interaction, group dynamics and reflective processes would provide a more comprehensive understanding of how communicative agency develops over time.

Fifthly, and most importantly, the study analyses discursive constructions of action rather than action itself. While the findings demonstrate how students construct sustainability as actionable through discourse, they do not establish whether these communicative practices translate into sustained behavioural or institutional change beyond the educational context. The relationship between communicative agency and actual sustainability action therefore remains an open empirical question. Communicative agency is therefore understood as a partial and situated mechanism, not as a comprehensive solution to the knowledge–action gap.

These limitations point to several directions for future research. Longitudinal studies tracking students beyond the course context would be particularly valuable in examining the durability and real-world impact of communicative agency. Comparative research across institutions, disciplines and programme formats could further clarify how different pedagogical designs shape the emergence of communicative agency. In addition, mixed-method approaches integrating discourse analysis with behavioural or participatory data could help bridge the gap between communicative construction and material action.

More broadly, the concept of communicative agency developed in this study provides a foundation for a cross-disciplinary research agenda bridging sustainability education, discourse theory and communicative language teaching. By integrating insights from sustainability competence frameworks, discourse-analytical approaches and models of communicative competence, the study reconceptualises communication not as a supporting skill, but as a mechanism through which (sustainability) knowledge is constructed, negotiated and mobilised in social contexts. In doing so, it extends existing work in ESD by foregrounding the discursive processes through which competencies become performable, while also contributing to applied linguistics by situating communicative competence within the domain of sustainability action.

Future research should further refine the analytical dimensions of communicative agency and examine its relationship with other (sustainability) competencies, particularly in relation to how cognitive, ethical and strategic capacities are enacted through discourse. Empirical work across diverse educational, professional and policy contexts is needed to test the concept’s transferability and explore how communicative agency operates at scales – from classroom interaction and pedagogical design to public discourse, institutional communication and sustainability governance. Such investigations may provide deeper insight into the communicative infrastructures that enable or constrain sustainability transitions. Despite the limitations outlined above, this study offers a theoretically grounded starting point for understanding communication not merely as a component of education, but as a central mechanism through which knowledge becomes socially actionable. Future research should explicitly test the transferability and robustness of communicative agency across different educational, organisational, professional and cultural contexts, including settings where sustainability communication is shaped by different language policies, institutional mandates and stakeholder configurations.

This study examined communicative agency within the context of an international higher education microcredential on English Communication for Sustainable Development. Responding to debates on the knowledge–action gap in sustainability education, the article explored how learners move from recognising sustainability issues towards discursively constructing actors, responsibilities, audiences and possible interventions.

Methodologically, the study adopted a qualitative exploratory case study design combining diagnostic survey data with discourse analysis of student-produced sustainability communication campaigns. The survey provided contextual insight into students’ initial understandings of communication in relation to sustainable development, while the campaign artefacts enabled analysis of how sustainability discourse was constructed across actor representation, responsibility attribution, modalisation and audience positioning.

The findings suggest that students entered the course with strong normative recognition of communication’s importance but more limited confidence in applying communication to stakeholder participation, behavioural change, governance and transparency. Through the campaign-based project, students began to construct sustainability as actionable by identifying agents, distributing responsibility, calibrating urgency and feasibility and adapting messages to specific audiences. These findings support the exploratory conceptualisation of communicative agency as a discourse-mediated dimension of sustainability competence, while remaining cautious about treating it as a fully validated or separate competence construct.

The study has implications for sustainability education, microcredential design and curriculum development. It suggests that communication-centred pedagogies can help students practise the discursive work involved in sustainability action, particularly when learning tasks require them to address target audiences, formulate calls to action, and negotiate responsibility across individual, institutional and collective levels. More broadly, the study indicates that higher education institutions may benefit from treating communication not only as a transferable skill but as part of the pedagogical infrastructure through which sustainability knowledge becomes socially meaningful and potentially actionable.

These conclusions must be interpreted in light of the study’s exploratory single-case design, the limited sample size, the voluntary and international character of the course and the researcher’s dual role as instructor and analyst. The study analyses discursive constructions of action rather than behavioural or institutional change beyond the course context. Future research should therefore examine the transferability and robustness of communicative agency across different educational, organisational, linguistic and cultural settings, using comparative, longitudinal and mixed-method designs capable of exploring how communicative constructions of sustainability relate to action over time.

The author gratefully acknowledges EU-CONEXUS for its institutional and general support, including full coverage of the article processing charge (APC) for the open access publication of this article. Special thanks are due to Neringa Narbutiene, Dominika Jastrzebowska and Amanda Sancho García for their institutional and practical support in the creation and implementation of the English Communication for Sustainable Development microcredential. Their support was valuable in enabling the development and delivery of the educational initiative on which this study is based.

This research received no specific grant funding from public, commercial or not-for-profit funding agencies. EU-CONEXUS provided institutional support for the educational initiative within which the study was conducted and fully covered the article processing charge (APC) for the open access publication of this article. EU-CONEXUS had no role in the research design, data collection, data analysis, interpretation of the findings, or the decision to submit the article for publication.

Generative AI and AIassisted tools were used in a supporting capacity during the preparation and revision of this manuscript. ChatGPT (OpenAI) was used during the initial preparation of the manuscript to assist with language, clarity, structure and refinement of the author’s original text and arguments. During subsequent revisions, ChatGPT, Claude (Anthropic) and Perplexity were used selectively to support linguistic and structural revision, clarification and cross-checking. ScienceOS and scite were used throughout the process to support literature searching and citation checking, with active oversight and verification by the author. Grammarly was also used throughout for linguistic revision and clarity. All original ideas, research design, data collection, analytical decisions, data analysis, interpretation and substantive arguments are the work of the author. All AI-assisted outputs and literature-related suggestions were reviewed, checked and, where necessary, revised by the author, who takes full responsibility for the final content of the manuscript.