This is an empirical study on leadership actions that promote Education for sustainable development and facilitate teachers abilities to realize ESD in Swedish schools. A review study on school leaders and education for sustainable development, ESD (Mogaji & Newton, 2020) reported the need to make school leaders more aware of ESD as a way to empower students to handle sustainable. The aim of this study is to identify the leadership actions that enable and constrains a permanent implementation of ESD. School leaders at five schools in a Swedish municipality is interviewed twice in 2018 and 2020, to evaluate effects from a longitude school improvement project focusing ESD. A theoretical framework; coupling mechanisms (Liljenberg & Nordholm 2018), is used to study how school leaders act on three organizational routines of ESD (a holistic idea of ESD, the interdisciplinary approach of ESD and leadership legitimization of ESD) over time. Accommodation mechanisms are searched as they intend to transform and change predefined understanding of education, causing real changes that are permanent. Leadership agency on ESD is demonstrated by thematization of collective acting by the whole group of respondents over time. Leadership agency towards an established ESD implementation is outlined by combining the mechanisms used by school leaders and identified themes of importance for the whole group in leading towards ESD.