S School Actions Plans for Sustainable Development Abigail López-Alcarria 1 , María Fátima de Poza-Vilches 3,4 and Alberto Olivares-Vicente 2 1 Department of Research Methods in Education, University of Granada, Granada, Spain 2 University of Granada, Granada, Spain 3 Educational Methodology Research Department, University of Granada, Granada, Spain 4 Faculty of Science Education Department MIDE, University of Granada, Granada, Spain Introduction Along this entry, we will present a comprehensive guide to developing school action plans for sus- tainable development, which could be used by Education Science students and professionals from different education levels to understand the dimensions which should be tackled whenever designing and executing action plans to promote Education of Sustainable Development (ESD). An action plan is a tool that helps educators to prioritize the most important significant initiatives to achieve a desired set of goals and objectives. It is constituted as a structure to follow when carry- ing out a project. The finality of an action plan is to optimize the management of resources, by economizing time and effort and improving performance, towards the consecution of the outlined objectives. Action plans are, as well, of great utility to coordinate and achieve commitment of people, organizations, and governments to get involved and work together within the context of the program where the action plan is followed. There are different educational programs revolving around ESD which can be carried out depending on the resources and needs, as well as policies, of each school. Arguably, the two most popular programs applied globally are the Scholar Agenda 21 and the Eco-Schools. As explained later in the entry, the Scholar Agenda 21 is derived from the Programme 21 (also known as Agenda 21) which was con- ceived in Rio’ s UN summit in 1992. This program reflects the commitment of UN members to act towards a sustainable social, economic, and envi- ronmental development. The scope of this program was later narrowed down with the creation of the Local Agenda 21, in which local government and institutions gather the general objectives of Pro- gramme 21 and translate them to specific action plans adjusted to the reality and needs of every participating town. The Local Agenda 21 became an ideal instrument to translate the concept of sus- tainable development in an urban environment by fostering sustainable management policies, institu- tional cooperation, and citizen participation. Schools, in their role of stakeholders of key impor- tance in every town, developed, in turn, their own action plans which were compiled in the Scholar Agenda 21. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 W. Leal Filho (ed.), Encyclopedia of Sustainability in Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11352-0