Environmental citizenship education for youth in the EU. The implementation of Erasmus+youth and European Solidarity Corps programmes in Greece and Sweden.

The global environmental and climate change emergency of the last decades has raised vital questions over how citizens may conduct a more sustainable private and public life. A key solution, in that case, is education, at all levels and in all its forms. Education can ensure that citizens are acquiring pro-environmental knowledge, values, and behaviours, eventually creating “environmental citizens”. Employing a combination of descriptive analysis, content analysis, and descriptive statistics, this dissertation explores how environmental citizenship education for youth is promoted at the EU level and how the concept is mainstreamed at the national level. Considering that national contexts differ, the empirical analysis is focused on investigating in which extent the EU can promote this concept, thus exploring the implementation of the Erasmus+ youth and European Solidarity Corps (ESC) programmes in Greece and Sweden. The results of the research reveal a quite different approach to environmental citizenship in the national formal education systems. It also discusses the several differences regarding the project-making capacity of the two countries-cases, in light of the EU programmes implementation, and highlights the EU’s role in that context. The dissertation also suggests that a more targeted to environmental citizenship formal education system does not necessarily correspond to a more structured implementation of the Erasmus+ youth and ESC programmes at the national level.