Sustainable development as a subject area and learning objective increasingly finds its way into the curriculum from pre-school to university level, and education and learning are emphasized as key drivers for sustainable development. At the same time, the sustainable development discourse has since its inception been met with critique, not least that it is a post-political discourse, which favours an instrumental view of knowledge and a simplified view of the relation between knowledge and action. In this article, we focus on the possibilities and challenges of teaching sustainable development in higher education. We argue that it is the formative role of higher education that is particularly important to explore in relation to the possibilities of education for sustainable development. In addition, we suggest that sociology can provide a good basis for both critical thinking and normative action, in ways that reaches beyond instrumental and narrow views of knowledge, human action and change.