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The notion of Environmental Citizenship embodies behaviour – an actively involved citizen who exercises his/her environmental rights and obligations in the private and public spheres. Education for Environmental Citizenship implies behavioural change; its goal is to facilitate an individual’s intellectual growth (cognitive domain) and emotional capacity (affective domain) that may lead to a critical and actively engaged individual. Human behaviour is overwhelmingly sophisticated, and what shapes pro-environmental behaviour is complex and context specific. Furthermore, empirical research indicates a discrepancy between possessing environmental knowledge and environmentally supportive attitudes and behaving pro-environmentally. The point of departure of this chapter is that the social and psychological study of behaviour has much to inform the study of environmental behaviour and, deriving from this, to inform regarding the type of education towards behaviour/action in the goal of sustainable socioecological transformation. The chapter focuses on internal (psychosocial) factors. It presents selected models regarding factors influencing behavioural decisions that are acknowledged as influential theoretical frameworks for investigating pro-environmental behaviour, as well as various theories that inform these models. These are categorised into knowledge-based models; attitude-, value- and norm-oriented models; skills, self-efficacy and situational factors; and new approaches to environmental behaviour models. The chapter concludes with suggestions for Education for Environmental Citizenship deriving from the various models.

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Taking its primary interest in active environmental citizenship, this paper aims at evaluating a case of an educational intervention designed to foster environmental citizenship among undergraduate students at a technological university. The study employs a survey methodology implementing a recently validated environmental citizenship questionnaire. A randomized pre-group –post-group quasi-experimental survey design explores students’ environmental citizenship attributes before and after the intervention course, ‘Sustainable Development’, in comparison to students who participated in a general elective course, ‘Media Philosophy’. The results show that the participation in the intervention course induced positive change in students’ environmental citizenship in comparison to the control group. Additional analysis indicates that environmental citizenship is significantly related to environmental attitudes, nature experiences during childhood and adolescence, and gender. The article provides a timely contribution shedding light on how specific pedagogical approaches in higher education can foster environmental citizenship.

This study aims to provide an empirically verified exploration of factors influencing environmental activist behaviour. The authors focus on the determinants of personal environmental activist behaviour as a characteristic of the culturally specific group of Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. A two-stage model of the biographical availability thesis is explored. Results reveal evident regional differences in patterns of public-sphere environmental behaviours across Europe. CEE countries exhibit lower levels of engagement in environmental activist behaviours than Western and Nordic European countries. The two-stage model of the biographical availability thesis is only partially confirmed. Age and employment status have a significant influence on behaviour: specifically, being 17-24 years old and in education increases availability for environmental activist behaviour. Gender has an additional influence upon participation in demonstrations and protests, with men being more participative. A low-commitment partnership status has additional influence on behavioural intentions. The results imply the need for further research into the context and cognitive determinants of environmental activist behaviour in CEE countries.