Action competence in environmental education

Action competence is a social process which refers to the ability to assess and look for solutions to current environmental problems and carry them out in practice, within a democratic system of cooperation and participation (Uzzell, 1997). Environmental action competence has several components: skills at a general level, knowledge of and insight into environmental problems and possibilities for solving them, environmental commitment, visions about our future lives, and environmental action experiences (Jensen et al., 1997). The objective of this paper focuses on the analysis of the school context, where we try to explore the adequacy of a responsible ecological behaviour model towards domestic waste based on the environmental action competence model. We also attempt to improve our previous study about the relationship between the attitudes towards the environment and the appearance of responsible ecological behaviours (Losada & GarciaMira, 2001), incorporating action competence within the general framework of the theory of planned behaviour (Ajzen, 1985, 1991), as well as comparing the effect of action competence both on behavioural intention and environmental behaviour.