What Does It Mean to Build Agency in Sustainability? A Framework for People, Organizations and Cities

Awareness without action leads to apathy. That warning, articulated by sustainability educator Arjen Wals in 2010, sits at the heart of one of the most persistent failures in our sustainability efforts — and at the heart of everything I have spent fifteen years trying to change.
We have more sustainability data, more climate reports, more ESG frameworks, and more awareness campaigns than at any point in history. And yet the gap between knowing and doing remains stubbornly, frustratingly wide. The question I keep returning to — in my research, in my consulting, in my teaching — is not how do we create more awareness? It is: how do we build the conditions for people to act, confidently, on what they already know?
That is what I mean by building agency. Not motivation. Not information. Agency: the capacity to influence the situations that shape your life and the lives of others — and the belief that you can.

The Problem: Awareness Is Not Enough
In 2011, researching how small businesses in Paris connected to sustainability for my MSc thesis at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, I found something that has stayed with me ever since. Mainstream businesses — the socio-economic fabric of the city, representing the vast majority of enterprises — expressed clear barriers to sustainability. They knew the challenges. They could articulate them. But knowing did not translate into acting.
What they lacked was not information. It was a felt sense of their own power to change anything. They expressed what I came to call a "feeling of helplessness, of playing an unimportant role." They saw sustainability as someone else's problem — the city's, the government's, the large corporations'. The disconnect was not cognitive. It was about agency.

"If you don't build on transformation and transformative aspects of transformation and you only focus on awareness without any action component, then awareness leads to apathy and powerlessness — and that is the exact opposite of what you want to achieve."
— Arjen Wals, Professor of Transformative Learning, Wageningen University, 2010

Thirteen years later, this insight appeared again — from a completely different angle — in my MA dissertation at Oulu University (2024), exploring how to design learning experiences around sustainable home acquisition. Interviewees understood that their housing choices carried financial, environmental, and social consequences. But the complexity of the decision — legal, technical, financial, ecological — left them overwhelmed, unsure where to start, unable to act. The awareness was there. The agency was not.

What Agency Actually Means
The concept of agency, as I use it, draws from three bodies of research that have converged across my work.
The first is Albert Bandura's theory of self-efficacy: the belief in one's capacity to execute the behaviors needed to produce specific outcomes. Bandura demonstrated that self-efficacy is not a fixed trait — it is built through experience, through seeing people like you succeed, through encouragement, and through managing emotional states that undermine confidence. Critically, it precedes action. People do not act, then become confident. They need enough confidence to begin acting at all.
The second is Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow: the state of full absorption in a meaningful, appropriately challenging task. Flow is not just about productivity. It is the experiential signature of agency in action — the feeling that what you are doing matters, that you are capable of it, and that it is neither too easy nor too overwhelming. My Oulu dissertation explored how flow-inspired learning design could create this state for people navigating sustainable home decisions — and found it transferable to organizational and urban sustainability contexts.
The third comes from the resilience literature I worked with at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Walker and Salt's framework identifies building social capital, enabling innovation, and tightening feedback loops as key characteristics of resilient systems. These are not technical fixes. They are conditions for agency — they make it possible for actors within a system to influence that system's trajectory.

A Three-Level Framework for Building Agency in Sustainability

Level One
People
Build self-efficacy through mastery experiences, peer modeling, and well-designed learning. Make complexity navigable, not invisible.

​Level Two
Organizations
Connect sustainability to existing motivations. Build trust through transparency. Create local places and networks where actors collaborate and share best practices.

Level Three
Cities
Devolve decision-making to the lowest appropriate level. Finance locally led action. Make the socio-economic fabric — especially small businesses — active co-designers of transition, not passive recipients.

Agency at the Organizational Level: What Paris Small Businesses Taught Me
The Paris study revealed that mainstream businesses were not anti-sustainability. They were, in many cases, genuinely motivated by social equity, by local community, by the idea of a better city. What they lacked were two things: a clear, concrete action they could take; and a trusted space in which to take it with others.
The most repeated request in my interviews was for "a place" — a physical space where businesses from different sectors could meet, exchange, eat together, share problems, invite local producers, and work on sustainability without the pressure of formal governance or competitive dynamics. This was not a utopian wish. It was a very practical expression of what agency requires at the organizational level: proximity, trust, and a concrete first step.
The frontrunners — businesses already engaged in sustainability — confirmed this from the other direction. They were not more informed than their mainstream counterparts. They were more practiced at acting under uncertainty, more comfortable with not knowing the whole picture, and more skilled at building the social capital that sustained their efforts over time. Agency, in this sense, is a capacity that can be cultivated. It is not given at birth and it is not reserved for frontrunners.

Agency at the Individual Level: The Housing Lesson
My 2024 Oulu dissertation explored a domain where agency is critically underdeveloped: housing decisions. For the vast majority of households, a home is the largest financial, social, and environmental decision of a lifetime. Yet almost no structured learning exists to help people make it well.
The result is what I call the "overwhelmed buyer" — someone who stops at the purchase price and mortgage rate, unable to integrate the environmental performance, community resilience, energy transition risk, or long-term wealth implications of their choice. Not because they are incapable, but because no one has designed the conditions for them to engage with it confidently.
This is a sustainability problem as much as a financial one. Buildings account for roughly 40% of global energy consumption. The decisions individual homeowners and HOA boards make about energy renovation, materials, and location have aggregate consequences at city and planetary scale. Building agency at the individual level — through well-designed, experiential, flow-informed learning — is therefore not a soft, personal development exercise. It is a leverage point for systemic change.

Agency at the City Level: The Latest Research Confirms It
Recent research from the field of community empowerment and urban resilience has converged on the same insight from the systems level. A 2024 systematic review published in Sustainability (MDPI) found that most sustainability and resilience programs — driven by governments, private sectors, and financial institutions — fail to build lasting change precisely because they lack a process of empowerment. Communities are treated as recipients of interventions rather than as co-designers and leaders of transition.
The World Bank's Locally Led Climate Action program, which had committed over $4 billion across 20 low-income countries by 2024, has demonstrated a different model: devolving climate planning to the lowest appropriate level, strengthening the capacity of local actors, and making finance manageable by the communities themselves. The results, tracked across more than 100 million projected beneficiaries by 2030, suggest that locally led approaches produce more durable, equitable, and effective sustainability outcomes than top-down programs.
The UK Green Building Council's 2024 Trends in Sustainable Solutions report echoed this from the built environment perspective, noting that participants in systemic change programs aligned around the observation that "we are the system" — highlighting the agency that every actor in the built environment already has, waiting to be unlocked.

What Building Agency Looks Like in Practice
Across fifteen years of work — from researching resilient cities in Stockholm, to training 500 Vietnamese enterprises in green action with the Stockholm Environment Institute, to advising HOA boards in Paris, to coaching executives at multinationals — I have found that building agency follows a consistent pattern, regardless of scale:

Start with what people already care about. In Paris, businesses cared about economic competitiveness, social attractiveness, and team cohesion. Sustainability framed through those lenses opened doors that "environmental responsibility" alone did not. In home buying, people cared about family security, financial stability, and a sense of place. These are the entry points, not the obstacles.

Make complexity navigable, not invisible. Simplifying sustainability does not build agency — it just creates a different kind of overwhelm when complexity resurfaces. What works is structured support for engaging with complexity: frameworks, checklists, trusted networks, and experienced guides who have been through it themselves.

Build trust before asking for action. The Paris frontrunners who had built the deepest sustainability practices shared one trait: they had invested in relationships — with their teams, their clients, their local communities — long before they needed those relationships to carry the weight of transformation. Trust, as one of my respondents put it, was built through "walking hand in hand" — being present, transparent, and consistent, even when things went wrong.

Design for the first step, not the whole journey. The biggest barrier to sustainability action is not opposition. It is the paralysis that comes from seeing the whole challenge at once. Agency grows through action. The first step — however small — creates the mastery experience that makes the second step possible.

Conclusion
Building agency in sustainability means something quite specific: it means designing the conditions — in education, in organizations, in urban governance, in the homes we buy and renovate — under which people move from knowing to acting, from passive awareness to confident ownership of the transition ahead.
It is the work I have done across three countries, two master's dissertations, and thousands of hours of coaching, consulting, and teaching. It is also, I believe, the most urgent and underdeveloped capability in our sustainability toolkit. We have the frameworks. We have the data. We have the awareness. What we need now is agency — at every level, for every actor, designed into the very structure of how we learn, work, and build.

I welcome responses, questions, and connections from anyone working at the intersection of sustainability, learning, and organizational transformation.

Sustainability Agency ESG Learning Design Urban Resilience Self-Efficacy Real Estate Education
Sources & References
Dissertation 1 — MSc, Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2011
Pessot, O. (2011). Small Businesses and how they connect to the Sustainable City: A list of actions for the transformation to a sustainable Paris. Stockholm Resilience Centre / Stockholm School of Economics. Supervisors: Susanne Sweet (SSE); Johan Colding (Beijer Institute).
academia.edu/120412411
Dissertation 2 — MA, Oulu University of Applied Sciences, 2024
Pessot, O. (2024). Connecting Home, Satisfaction and Wealth through Sustainability: Preparatory Steps to Developing a Flow-inspired Learning Design. Oulu University of Applied Sciences. Supervisors: Johanna Pihlajamaa; Sari Alatalo.
theseus.fi/handle/10024/852171

Foundational Theoretical Sources (cited in both dissertations)
Self-Efficacy — Bandura
Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.2.191

Flow — Csikszentmihalyi
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row, New York.

Resilience Thinking — Walker & Salt
Walker, B., & Salt, D. (2006). Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Island Press, Washington DC.

Awareness & Action in Sustainability Education — Wals
Wals, A. (2010). Interview on sustainability education and transformation. Cited in: Pessot (2011), p.1. Stockholm Wisdom Exchange for Sustainable Development (SWEDES 2010).

Social-Ecological Resilience — Folke et al.
Folke, C., Carpenter, S., Elmqvist, T., Gunderson, L., Holling, C.S., & Walker, B. (2002). Resilience and sustainable development: Building adaptive capacity in a world of transformations. AMBIO, 31(5), 437–440. doi.org/10.1579/0044-7447-31.5.437

Recent Research (2024–2025)
Community Empowerment for Sustainability — Dushkova & Ivlieva, 2024
Dushkova, D., & Ivlieva, O. (2024). Empowering Communities to Act for a Change: A Review of the Community Empowerment Programs towards Sustainability and Resilience. Sustainability, 16(19), 8700. doi.org/10.3390/su16198700

Locally Led Climate Action — World Bank, 2024
World Bank. (2024, November 19). Scaling Up Locally Led Climate Action to Enable Community Resilience and Equitable Climate Transitions. Over $4 billion committed across 20 low-income countries; 100M+ beneficiaries projected by 2030. worldbank.org/en/results/2024/11/19

Trends in Sustainable Solutions — UKGBC, 2024
UK Green Building Council. (2024). Trends in Sustainable Solutions 2024. Includes analysis of agency in systemic change programs and regenerative design approaches. ukgbc.org/trends-in-solutions-2024

Awareness–Action Gap in Sustainability — Sustainability Directory, 2024
Sustainability Directory. (2024, December 21). How to bridge the gap between awareness and action in sustainability. Analysis of psychological distance, lack of perceived efficacy, and strategies including education for action and community building. sustainability-directory.com

Tailored Empowerment Program for Sustainability Transition — IWA Publishing, 2025
Dushkova, D. et al. (2025). How to support communities in the long-term sustainability transition: The tailored empowerment program. Blue-Green Systems, 7(1), 210. iwaponline.com/bgs/article/7/1/210/108218

Youth Agency in Sustainability Policy — UN SDG:Learn, 2024
UN SDG:Learn. (2024). Equipping Youth with Education, Training, and Agency in Shaping Policies for a Sustainable Future. References the UN Transforming Education Summit (2022) and Summit of the Future (2024). unsdglearn.org