This study aims to investigate teacher-students within social studies interpretation and understanding of the policy assignment regarding sustainable development and their attitudes towards the same assignment. Based on their reasoning about the assignment the aim is to identify how this can affect the future implementation of the policy assignment. This is done with implementation theory, text analysis of the curriculum and semi-structured interviews with students at Umeå University.This thesis established that Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) must be implemented in some way in the social sciences subject. The short formulations and partly implicit content in the curriculum and syllabus prove to be difficult to understand for the interviewees. The fact that teacher students do not understand the policy has proved to be an important explanation of the shortcomings that emerge in their reasoning about the assignment. Informants in this study interpret that the assignment is only to talk about and not for sustainable development. Partly, they also lack certain abilities both in form of knowledge and methods to be able to meet the complexity regarding sustainable development and ESD. The teacher students do not consider themselves to have addressed these issues in their University education, which both can be seen as an explanation for the identified shortcomings and the individual differences between the studentsThe results can be interpreted as that the problems concerning ESD, as research identified among active teachers, are to some extent reproduced in teacher education, which means that this study should encourage further studies based on the results of the thesis.