From Delivery to Consciousness: Pedagogical Sovereignty and the Epistemic Turn in Youth Sport-for-Development

Abstract

Sport-for-Development (SfD) programmes are often described through logics that distinguish between sport-centred and development-centred interventions. While the Sport Plus and Plus Sport typologies remain useful for identifying programme priorities, they say considerably less about who defines development, whose knowledge becomes legitimate, and how young people participate in interpreting the changes attributed to sport. This critical conceptual review addresses that epistemic problem by bringing SfD scholarship into dialogue with Freirean and decolonial pedagogy, epistemic justice, anthropology of embodiment, and situated experiences of youth and community sport in Latin America. Rather than proposing a third programme type, the article develops consciousness as a cross-cutting epistemological-pedagogical orientation through which either Sport Plus or Plus Sport may be reinterpreted. Consciousness is the central orientation, and pedagogical sovereignty is its political expression: the capacity of young people, educators, and communities to participate meaningfully in defining purposes, producing interpretations, negotiating values, and judging what constitutes meaningful change. Epistemic justice supplies its normative foundation, epistemic and sensory ecologies its analytical dimensions, and pluriversality its ethical horizon. The orientation is specified through four necessary criteria (epistemic humility, pedagogical sovereignty, pluriversality, and embodiment), recognising that knowledge in sport is produced not only through discourse but also through movement, sensory experience, relationships, memory, and territory. Illustrations from Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico, several drawn from the author’s connected scholarship, clarify these relationships without being treated as representative of Latin America as a whole or as independent validation of the framework. The article therefore proposes, as a theoretical position rather than a demonstrated transition of the field, an epistemic turn from delivery toward relation, from externally defined outcomes toward pedagogical sovereignty, and from universal developmental assumptions toward situated and pluriversal understandings of youth development through sport.

1. Introduction

The contemporary field of Sport-for-Development (SfD) consolidated as sport became mobilised within international development, peace, health, education, and social inclusion agendas (Coalter, 2010; Kidd, 2008). Children, adolescents, and young adults became important participants in programmes pursuing these objectives. Within this expansion, Sport Plus and Plus Sport offered a distinction between programmes giving primacy to sport development and those prioritising non-sport development objectives (Coalter, 2007, 2010). Neither typology prescribes a pedagogy, epistemology, facilitator role, or evaluation method. This review examines the problems that can arise when programme governance privileges externally determined purposes and indicators over participants’ interpretations.

Critical SfD scholarship provides grounds for examining such arrangements without assuming that all programmes reproduce them (Black, 2010; S. Darnell, 2012; Nicholls et al., 2011). Decolonial engagement with SfD (S. C. Darnell & Hayhurst, 2011) and critical pedagogical work within the field (Spaaij et al., 2016) provide independent interlocutors for the present argument. Their inclusion locates the proposal within existing debates; it does not establish the validity of the consciousness orientation developed here. The gap addressed by this review is therefore not the absence of participatory, dialogical, critical, or culturally responsive approaches, but the need for a cross-cutting analytical account of when participants can revise interpretive categories, influence consequential programme decisions, negotiate definitions of success, and contribute embodied knowledge across different programme orientations. The guiding question is who can define desirable development, interpret experience, and influence the terms under which sporting participation is judged.

Studies of community sport, life-skills education, and refugee youth belonging offer situated accounts of relational processes relevant to this question (Hall & Reis, 2019; Hills et al., 2018; Spaaij, 2015). They do not establish a uniform pathway of transformation. The regional illustrations developed in Section 4 likewise serve conceptual clarification rather than regional generalisation or independent validation of the proposed framework. This article therefore advances an epistemic turn as a theoretical proposition, not as an already demonstrated movement of youth SfD or Latin American scholarship as a whole.

Here, managerial sovereignty denotes institutional authority to determine programme purposes, legitimate knowledge, and interpretations of change. Pedagogical sovereignty names the political expression of the proposed consciousness orientation: young people’s and communities’ consequential influence over pedagogical decisions. This formulation draws on questions of epistemic recognition and situated pedagogy (Fricker, 2007; Walsh, 2009; Ponciano Núñez & Carter, 2025), but its particular integration belongs to the present review. It neither removes adult responsibility nor assumes that local practices are necessarily emancipatory.

The argument also concerns the forms in which knowledge becomes recognisable. Work on sensory ecologies, culturally situated skill, and haptic learning examines how sporting knowledge emerges through bodily and environmental relations (Carter et al., 2022; Carter, 2022; Heath & Carter, 2024). Extending these insights to youth SfD is an analytical move made here, rather than an empirical conclusion established for every youth setting. It invites attention to young people as embodied knowers whose movement, perception, language, and relationships may inform how development is understood. Section 2 specifies the conceptual hierarchy and criteria through which this proposal can be distinguished and examined.

2. Conceptual Orientation and Scope

This article is a critical conceptual review, not a systematic review or programme evaluation. It brings four bodies of scholarship into dialogue: critical research on SfD and youth sport; Freirean and decolonial approaches to pedagogy and epistemic justice; anthropological work on embodiment and sensory learning; and empirical studies of Latin American youth and community sport. Youth is treated as a situated social position shaped by territory, inequality, mobility, culture, and relationships. The synthesis examines four tensions: delivery versus relation, external definition versus local authorship, universal values versus situated moral grammars, and disembodied indicators versus embodied knowledge.

Literature selection is purposive and concept-driven. The synthesis works from a selected bibliography rather than a reproducible database search. During revision, this bibliography was supplemented by targeted author-and-title searches for scholarship on programme typologies, critical pedagogy, and evaluation; publication details were checked against publisher pages and institutional records. These searches served conceptual clarification and bibliographic verification, not systematic retrieval. Inclusion rests on a source’s relevance to programme typologies, pedagogical and epistemic authority, embodied knowing, or situated interpretations of youth sport. Sources fall outside the synthesis when their contribution is limited to sporting performance, participation levels, or programme effectiveness without engaging the conceptual questions under review. Geographical location alone does not establish relevance, and regional studies are not included as evidence of a uniform Latin American experience. The four bodies receive different analytical roles rather than numerical weights: SfD scholarship frames the programme debate; critical and decolonial pedagogy informs its normative interrogation; anthropology elaborates embodied knowing; and regional studies provide contextual illustrations.

The regional cases in Section 4 are illustrative, not representative of Latin America or the Global South. They were selected for conceptual relevance, because they make three relationships visible (cultural and linguistic translation, re-signification of values in displacement, and community theorisation of relational learning), not through regional sampling or systematic retrieval. Several derive from connected scholarship and cannot confirm the framework independently; their function is heuristic.

Sources combine conceptual critiques, considered for the distinctions they make possible, and empirical studies, considered within their reported scope. Outcome-focused studies remain relevant where they challenge the review’s interpretation. This approach permits conceptual comparison but cannot establish how common an orientation is, whether one programme type is more effective, or whether the literature has reached consensus.

2.1. Conceptual Contribution of This Article

The review draws on established arguments rather than treating participation, dialogue, situated knowledge, or embodiment as new discoveries. Programme typologies clarify the relative primacy of sport and wider development objectives (Coalter, 2007, 2010). Critical and decolonial pedagogies inform questions of authority and knowledge (Freire, 1970; Quijano, 2000), while epistemic injustice provides a vocabulary for examining unequal recognition (Fricker, 2007). Sensory ecologies and haptic learning foreground knowledge produced through movement and bodily relations (Carter et al., 2022; Heath & Carter, 2024). These contributions provide the review’s conceptual resources; they do not independently establish the framework proposed here.

The article’s contribution is to bring these resources into a specific account of consciousness as an epistemological-pedagogical orientation: a commitment to making programme purposes, interpretations, and judgements of change answerable to young people’s situated and embodied knowledge. Relative to the earlier Sport Consciousness formulation (Ponciano Núñez, 2025b), the present proposal specifies four necessary criteria and applies them across programme orientations. Its distinctive claim concerns their conjunction and consequences for epistemic authority, rather than the novelty of any individual commitment.

The criteria below are proposed analytical requirements, not a validated assessment instrument or evidence of superior outcomes. A programme qualifies within this framework only where all four inform its practices; adopting participatory language or inviting dialogue is insufficient. Assessment would examine who can contest interpretations, influence decisions, negotiate meanings, and contribute embodied knowledge. Participatory, dialogical, critical, and culturally relevant pedagogies can meet these requirements; they are not presumed to lack them. Conversely, their labels alone cannot establish that the requirements are met.

The proposed epistemic turn is thus the article’s theoretical position, not a demonstrated transition of the field as a whole.

2.2. Conceptual Hierarchy and Necessary Criteria

Within this proposal, consciousness is the central epistemological–pedagogical orientation. Pedagogical sovereignty is its political expression: authority to help shape pedagogical purposes and judgements. Epistemic justice supplies its normative foundation. Epistemic and sensory ecologies constitute its analytical dimensions, addressing plural and embodied relations of knowing. Pluriversality is its horizon, keeping development open to situated ethical meanings. Pedagogical sovereignty and pluriversality therefore play two roles: as the political expression and ethical horizon of the orientation as a whole, and, as criteria 2 and 3 below, as specific conditions against which a programme can be examined.

1. Epistemic humility. This criterion concerns authority over the interpretation of experience. Young people’s accounts must be able to unsettle how institutions classify and explain their sporting lives. Distinction test: can what young people say lead to revision of the programme’s interpretive categories? Participation, dialogue, critical discussion, or culturally relevant teaching is insufficient when their accounts are heard but must fit categories whose meaning remains exclusively institutionally controlled.

2. Pedagogical sovereignty. This criterion concerns authority over decisions about programme purposes, learning processes, and evaluation criteria, with adult responsibilities made explicit. Distinction test: which concrete decisions can young people’s and communities’ contributions change? Participatory, dialogical, critical, or culturally relevant activities are insufficient when participants can express preferences but cannot influence consequential choices about what the programme pursues, how it proceeds, or how it is evaluated.

3. Pluriversality. This criterion concerns the negotiability of values and definitions of success across situated ethical horizons. Distinction test: can an externally introduced value or definition of success be re-signified or replaced through engagement with local histories, languages, and ethical reasoning? Participation, dialogue, critique, or cultural adaptation is insufficient when it changes how a fixed external ideal is communicated while leaving that ideal beyond negotiation. Negotiability does not make every local claim ethically defensible.

4. Embodiment. Movement, sensory judgement, affect, and bodily relations must contribute to interpreting learning and evaluating change, alongside verbal accounts. Distinction test: an active, participatory, dialogical, critical, or culturally relevant programme fails this criterion if bodily experience serves only as an instructional vehicle and cannot inform what counts as knowledge or meaningful change.

2.3. Distinction from Neighbouring Pedagogies

The distinction from neighbouring pedagogies concerns the scope of authority rather than a claim to supersede them. Knijnik et al. (2019) offer a point of comparison in dialogic sports education, while Pill et al. (2022) provide a culturally responsive curriculum and pedagogy perspective. Read alongside critical pedagogy in SfD (Spaaij et al., 2016), these contributions make it inappropriate to identify dialogue, contextual relevance, or participant agency as the exclusive property of consciousness. The present proposal asks a more specific question: when these commitments are enacted, do they extend across interpretation, consequential decisions, ethical meanings, and embodied knowledge?

An analytical example clarifies the boundary without attributing deficiencies to those sources. A programme may invite young people to discuss how a game felt, yet translate every account into a predetermined category of confidence or resilience; dialogue has occurred, but the category has not become revisable. Another may let participants choose activities while reserving purpose and evaluation standards for adults, a narrower scope than the sovereignty proposed here. These are hypothetical distinctions, not programmes reviewed here.

Cultural relevance likewise need not stop at adapting language or examples: the pluriversal and embodiment criteria ask whether the value taught can be re-signified, and whether young people’s ways of moving and sensing can influence what learning means. A programme could meet these requirements through an existing pedagogical tradition; consciousness names their conjunction, not a hierarchy in which other approaches are incomplete.

3. From Delivery to Consciousness in Youth Sport-for-Development

SfD consolidated as sport became mobilised within policy agendas addressing development, education, health, and peace, with young people positioned as key participants in these interventions (Kay, 2009; Kidd, 2008). Yet the reviewed literature suggests that meaningful change can depend on relational dynamics, including trust, care, and belonging, rather than follow automatically from programme delivery (Cardenas, 2016; Hall & Reis, 2019; Spaaij, 2015). Coalter’s (2013) attention to relationships provides an antecedent for examining these processes within explanations of sport-for-change. This relational concern connects the question of programme primacy with the conditions through which young people experience and interpret sporting practice.

Sport Plus and Plus Sport identify programme primacy. Sport Plus retains sport participation, sporting skills, or sport development as central while adapting or augmenting sport to pursue wider social objectives. Plus Sport prioritises non-sport development objectives and incorporates sport within a broader process (Coalter, 2007, 2010). Reading these orientations as a continuum allows for overlap rather than imposing mutually exclusive categories (Holt et al., 2013; Njelesani et al., 2016). Hartmann and Kwauk (2011) present the labels as ends of a spectrum within a broader critique of SfD, and Commers et al. (2022) apply them to a sport-for-employability programme whose enactment did not follow either model consistently.

Three related questions sharpen this distinction. First, how adequate are the labels for interpreting SfD practice? Whitley’s (2025) critique places the labels themselves under scrutiny. Second, what can programme classification explain? LeCrom et al. (2019) examine management in relation to health-focused SfD objectives, supporting attention to programme arrangements beyond classification. Third, how is change expected to occur? Jones et al. (2017) direct attention from outcomes towards mechanisms and theory of change. These sources address different explanatory questions: the usefulness of labels, the organisation of programmes, and the processes connecting activities with change. Consciousness is the present article’s proposed response to these questions.

The continuum reading matters because a programme’s emphasis does not exhaust the relationships organised around it. Holt et al. (2013) and Njelesani et al. (2016) recognise the difficulty of treating programme categories as sharply separated; so, primacy is used here as a starting description rather than a basis for inferring a pedagogical structure. This is not a comparative claim about effectiveness.

Whitley’s (2025) critique asks whether the labels remain useful. This article retains their descriptive function while asking what they leave unresolved: naming a programme cannot settle who authors its purposes or whose interpretation of change has authority.

Management and theory-of-change literature also prevents reducing programme limitations to terminology. LeCrom et al. (2019) make programme management an object of inquiry, and Jones et al. (2017) use theory of change to examine the sport-based youth development literature. Classifying purposes, explaining processes, and judging outcomes are therefore related but distinct tasks; consciousness adds a question about the authority involved, not a substitute for investigating whether intended outcomes occur.

Neither Sport Plus nor Plus Sport prescribes a pedagogy, epistemology, facilitator role, or evaluation method. The concern here is with managerial governance where external actors retain authority over purposes, legitimate knowledge, and judgements of success. Predetermined indicators can then delimit what becomes visible as development. The proposed consciousness orientation asks how that authority might become answerable to young people and communities through the four criteria specified above.

Within this proposal, sport becomes a medium through which young people interpret and potentially transform their circumstances. Knowing with and through young people, rather than only about them, means allowing their situated and embodied experience to shape how sporting practice and change are understood. Transformation remains a possibility to investigate, not an outcome guaranteed by this orientation.

Table 1 distinguishes what programme typologies specify from contrasting enactments across five analytical dimensions. Its cells are analytical scenarios, not descriptions of inherent characteristics or estimates of how programmes operate. Managerial arrangements and shared authority may coexist or be contested within a programme; their relationship requires contextual examination.

Table 1. Programme typologies and analytical scenarios of enactment in youth SfD.

Dimension	Specified by the Typology	Enacted Through Managerial Governance	Enacted Through a Consciousness Orientation
Role of sport	Sport Plus: sport development is primary. Plus Sport: non-sport development is primary.	Within either primacy, external actors determine sport’s purposes and legitimate uses.	Within either primacy, young people and communities influence sport’s purposes and negotiate its situated meanings.
Theory of change	Not specified	External actors define expected pathways and retain authority to interpret departures from them.	Proposed pathways remain open to revision through young people’s interpretations, shared decisions, and situated experience.
Role of facilitator	Not specified	Facilitators implement authorised purposes and interpret experience through institutionally controlled categories.	Facilitators share interpretive and decision-making space, mediate negotiated meanings, and recognise embodied knowing while retaining adult responsibility.
Evaluation emphasis	Not specified	Externally defined indicators and standards determine what counts as success; participant accounts are assessed within those terms.	Young people help shape evaluation criteria; definitions of success can be re-signified or replaced, and embodied experience contributes to judgements.
Epistemic status	Not specified	Institutional categories determine legitimate knowledge; youth accounts cannot revise their terms.	Youth knowledge can revise interpretive categories; sensory and embodied knowing has standing alongside verbal accounts.

Note: Sport Plus and Plus Sport specify programme primacy; they do not prescribe pedagogy, epistemology, facilitator roles, theories of change, or evaluation methods. The two enactment columns present analytical scenarios, not inherent properties of the typologies or estimates of programme prevalence. A consciousness orientation requires all four criteria in Section 2.2; it does not imply demonstrated effectiveness.

4. Pedagogical Sovereignty, Youth Agency, and the Struggle for Epistemic Justice

Pedagogical sovereignty concerns consequential influence over decisions, as distinguished in Section 2 from authority over interpretation and the negotiability of values. The question is whether young people and communities can shape programme purposes, learning processes, and evaluation criteria. Critical work on subaltern recognition and development power provides an independent basis for examining unequal authority in SfD (Banda & Holmes, 2017; S. Darnell, 2012). Decolonial and critical pedagogical scholarship further situates this discussion within established SfD debates (S. C. Darnell & Hayhurst, 2011; Spaaij et al., 2016). The present review brings these concerns into its own account of consciousness; those sources are not treated as validations of that account.

Read through the lens of epistemic injustice, arrangements that restrict local educators to implementation while reserving interpretation and publication for external actors raise questions about recognition and authority (Fricker, 2007; Santos, 2015). This is an application of those conceptual resources, not a claim that every division of institutional responsibilities constitutes injustice. The analytical issue is whether situated contributions can influence knowledge and decisions, rather than merely supply material for externally controlled accounts.

Across the three regional illustrations, different processes become analytically visible rather than a shared Latin American pattern. Cultural and linguistic translation is the clearest in Guatemala, where Coubertinian and Olympic education was adapted in K’iche’ Maya communities (Armira Lucas & Ponciano Núñez, 2024; Ponciano Núñez, 2025c). Re-signification is foregrounded in northern Mexico, where accounts from work with children and adolescents in a refugee shelter describe friendship, respect, and peace through care, conflict negotiation, and shared vulnerability (Muñoz-Helú et al., 2026; Ponciano Núñez et al., 2026). Community theorisation and relational learning are visible in Colombian football research grounded in memory, care, resistance, and ethical presence (Ponciano Núñez, 2025a). These examples are not treated as parallel confirmations of pedagogical sovereignty; each illuminates a different relationship that the framework asks researchers to examine.

Independent scholarship provides comparison without converting the illustrations into validation. Mandigo et al. (2018) offers a distinct Guatemalan outcomes-focused study; Spaaij (2015) and Hudson et al. (2023) show how belonging and pedagogy with refugee-background young people can depend on relational conditions; and Oxford and Spaaij (2017) examine critical pedagogy and power in Colombian SfD. Read together, these sources support attention to translation, relation, and authority while leaving open whether participants can alter programme purposes, evaluation criteria, or interpretive categories. Adaptation, re-signification, and local theorisation should therefore be distinguished from the stronger claim that consequential authority is shared.

The distinction between illustrating a concept and evidencing a framework limits what can be inferred. Translation may make content intelligible without transferring authority over aims; re-signification may change a value’s meaning without changing governance; local theorisation may appear in an educator’s account while young participants remain excluded from interpretation. The review therefore resists combining partial correspondences across separate studies into a demonstration of the whole framework. A future study could examine their conjunction within one programme and distinguish institutional commitments from participants’ experience.

These illustrations do not represent Latin America or the Global South, and several belong to connected scholarship. They make particular relationships intelligible without classifying the programmes as fully consciousness-oriented; pedagogical sovereignty remains a question for investigation and a normative commitment, not a demonstrated property of the cases.

5. Examining Knowledge Hegemony in Youth SfD

Knowledge hegemony is examined here as a possible concentration of authority over programme purposes, evidence, ethical meanings, and legitimate forms of knowing. Critical accounts of SfD identify problems of privileged voices and unequal recognition that warrant this inquiry (Nicholls et al., 2011; Banda & Holmes, 2017). Decolonial scholarship supplies a further lens on power within SfD (S. C. Darnell & Hayhurst, 2011). The four mechanisms below are the review’s analytical synthesis, not an empirically established classification of all youth programmes.

Definitional authority concerns who determines what development should mean. Goals such as health, inclusion, or employability need not be dismissed as externally imposed. The problem identified here arises when their interpretation cannot be questioned by the young people concerned. Coakley’s (2011) interrogation of what counts as positive development provides a basis for examining these assumptions without treating any particular goal as inherently illegitimate.

Evaluative control concerns authority over what counts as credible evidence and who may interpret it. Levermore (2011) discusses how SfD is evaluated, Harris and Adams (2016) examine the politics of evidence, and Whitley et al. (2019) appraise the quality of SfD intervention research. They are not invoked here to claim that all current evaluation paradigms privilege countable outcomes. This review instead asks whether a particular evaluation allows participant accounts to revise its categories and judgements. Indicators can support accountability while remaining insufficient for questions they were not designed to answer; whether this occurs must be established in the setting under examination.

Moral universalism concerns the treatment of ethical meanings as settled before encounters with participants. The analytical question is whether values can be interpreted and negotiated through situated experience, rather than whether shared values should be abandoned. Broader decolonial thought informs this question (Walsh, 2010; Santos, 2015), but does not establish how frequently such closure occurs in SfD.

Embodied disqualification concerns the exclusion of sensory, tacit, or bodily contributions from legitimate knowledge. Work on sensory ecologies and haptic learning supplies resources for considering these forms of knowing (Carter et al., 2022; Heath & Carter, 2024), and work on embodied pedagogies in physical education offers an independent point of comparison (Aartun et al., 2022). Their possible exclusion from youth programme evaluation is an inference to investigate, not a prevalence claim derived from those studies.

Table 2 presents these four mechanisms as potential analytical concerns. The illustrations in Section 4 do not demonstrate that communities uniformly resist institutional control; recognising local knowledge requires scrutiny of whose local knowledge is heard, rather than an assumption that community participation is automatically emancipatory.

Table 2. Potential epistemic mechanisms of hegemony in youth SfD.

Mechanism	What It Means	How It Could Appear in Youth SfD	Sources
Definitional authority	External actors may reserve authority to determine what counts as development and which outcomes matter.	Standardised templates can define goals without allowing local histories or young people’s interpretations to revise them.	Coakley (2011); Kidd (2008)
Evaluative control	Evidence standards can concentrate authority over evaluation with donors or international organisations.	Institutionally privileged indicators can limit the standing of youth accounts and relational interpretations of change.	Levermore (2011); Harris and Adams (2016); Nicholls et al. (2011)
Moral universalism	Ethical meanings may be treated as universally settled before engagement with participants.	Imported ideals (e.g., “respect,” “peace,” “resilience”) can be presented as universal rather than translated and re-signified with young people.	S. Darnell (2012); S. C. Darnell and Hayhurst (2011); Walsh (2010)
Embodied disqualification	Abstract or codified knowledge may be privileged over sensory, tacit, linguistic, or embodied knowing.	Young people’s sensory, tacit, linguistic, peer-based, and embodied ways of knowing can become invisible in programme design and evaluation.	Carter et al. (2022); Heath and Carter (2024)

Managerial sovereignty, in this usage, is not equivalent to having a budget, curriculum, professional expertise, or reporting obligations; its defining concern is the closure of consequential interpretation and decision-making. Local language or community representatives do not by themselves establish shared authority. The relevant question is whether a programme can explain its decisions while allowing those affected to contest the terms on which they are made.

6. Policy Typologies and Epistemic Ecologies in Youth Sport

Epistemic ecologies are used here to examine how knowledge becomes meaningful and authoritative through relationships among people, histories, languages, territories, and institutions. This is an analytical extension developed by the review, not a claim that SfD scholarship has collectively moved beyond binary models. Lugones (2010) contributes to the broader decolonial background; her work is not treated as evidence of a trend within SfD. Critical pedagogical work in the field provides a more direct interlocutor for examining situated learning and authority (Spaaij et al., 2016). Santos’s (2015) ecology of knowledges provides an independent reference point for this extension.

Sensory ecologies add a distinct analytical dimension. Carter et al. (2022) examine relations among movement, senses, materials, space, and time; Carter (2022) and Heath and Carter (2024) address culturally situated skill and bodily learning. Because Carter is a co-author of related work by the present author (Ponciano Núñez & Carter, 2025), this body of scholarship is connected rather than fully independent, and the embodiment criterion remains a proposal that independent research on embodiment could test. These resources allow the review to distinguish plurality in interpretations from plurality in how knowledge is cultivated and expressed. The connection to consciousness is proposed here: recognising several perspectives is insufficient if bodily and sensory contributions remain excluded from what programmes accept as knowledge. Independent work offers further anchors: Wacquant (2004) and Ingold (2000) treat practical bodily knowledge as acquired through apprenticeship and engagement with the environment, and Aartun et al. (2022) review embodied pedagogies in physical education.

An ecological reading therefore asks how the four criteria specified in Section 2.2 operate together in a particular setting. Their relationships must be examined rather than inferred from a programme’s description as participatory or culturally relevant. The illustrations in Section 4 identify possible entry points, not evidence that all requirements have been fulfilled.

This perspective also changes the questions asked of evaluation. Work on the politics of evidence and the quality of intervention research provides an independent context for that discussion (Harris & Adams, 2016; Whitley et al., 2019). The review’s own methodological proposition is that the choice of evidence should follow the knowledge question and the relationships through which it can be investigated. Numerical indicators may address some questions, while narrative, participatory, ethnographic, or sensory approaches may address others. No method alone guarantees shared interpretive authority or epistemic justice.

Table 3 therefore presents possible methodological approaches rather than a validated toolkit or a hierarchy of evidentiary worth. It draws on established methodological sources: participatory action research (McIntyre, 2008); narrative inquiry, collaborative ethnography, and embodied autoethnography (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Lassiter, 2005; Spry, 2001); and mixed methods with community-defined indicators (Svensson & Levine, 2017). Their suitability depends on the question, context, ethical responsibilities, and opportunities for participants to influence interpretation. Carter’s (2018) discussion of ethnography is relevant to the need for sustained relational engagement rather than treating inquiry as a portable technique. Whether these arrangements improve youth experiences remains an empirical question.

Table 3. Possible methodological implications of an epistemic and embodied orientation in youth SfD.

Method/Approach	What It Captures	When to Use	Exemplary Sources
Participatory action research	Co-authored goals, iterative learning, youth participation, and forms of community agency.	Long-term partnerships and co-design of youth curricula, activities, evaluation criteria, or programmes.	McIntyre (2008); Oxford and Spaaij (2017)
Collaborative ethnography/narrative inquiry	Long-term relational knowledge, youth experience, memory, belonging, co-presence, narrative meaning, and co-interpretation.	When transformation must be understood through sustained participation and collaboratively interpreted narratives and practice.	Carter (2018); Clandinin and Connelly (2000); Lassiter (2005); Spry (2001)
Mixed methods with community indicators	Breadth and depth of evidence combined with youth- and community-defined outcomes.	When negotiating accountability with funders while retaining locally meaningful indicators of youth development.	Svensson and Levine (2017); Coakley (2011)
Sensory and embodiment-based inquiry	Movement, sensory judgement, affective experience, tacit knowledge, peer relations, and body–environment interaction.	When investigating how young people learn, sense, enact, and transmit sporting meanings beyond verbal accounts.	Carter et al. (2022); Carter (2022); Heath and Carter (2024)

Methodological congruence is a relationship between the claim being made and the knowledge through which it can be examined. A claim about the meanings of bodily participation cannot be established solely by attendance, just as belonging cannot by itself establish an effect on school completion. Each form of inquiry retains its own scope, and disagreements between indicators and participants’ accounts may be analytically informative rather than corrected in favour of either. A chosen method may also fail to make the relationship of interest visible.

7. Towards an Epistemic Turn in Youth SfD

The epistemic turn advanced here concerns the conditions under which young people and communities can participate in authoring knowledge about sport and development. Its central claim is that recognising experience as information differs from recognising participants as interpreters whose contributions can alter categories, purposes, and judgements. A programme may collect extensive youth accounts while insulating its conceptual terms from revision. The proposed turn therefore concerns the distribution of epistemic authority; it is not presented as a field-wide transition or as a description of every programme.

Pluriversality provides the ethical horizon for this question. Escobar (2018), Santos (2015), and broader decolonial scholarship (Lugones, 2010; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Walsh, 2009) open inquiry into whose worlds become intelligible within development discourse. This does not make local claims automatically emancipatory. Communities are internally differentiated, and disagreements among young people, families, educators, and organisations remain matters for ethical deliberation. The framework therefore asks how competing meanings become authoritative and who can contest them, rather than treating community knowledge as a unified position.

Embodiment adds a distinct boundary. Sensory ecologies and haptic learning show that sporting knowledge can be expressed through movement, perception, affect, and bodily practice (Carter et al., 2022; Heath & Carter, 2024). The present review extends this insight to epistemic authority in youth SfD: an account confined to verbal voice may miss forms of knowing through which participants interpret activity and change. Bodily experience is not self-explanatory, however; its meaning can also be contested and requires contextual interpretation.

The framework is situated in time and scale: a programme may share some decisions while funding remains external, or sustain dialogue in one phase and close it in another. The four criteria are necessary within the definition proposed here, not empirically demonstrated prerequisites of meaningful development; valuable outcomes may occur without them, and programmes that enact them may still fail particular objectives. Their explanatory value, feasibility, and effects remain open to empirical testing.

8. Reframing Youth Sport-for-Development: Towards Pedagogies of Consciousness

This review contributes a conceptual account of consciousness as an orientation towards the authority, meanings, and forms of knowing through which youth development is defined. Its contribution lies in relating established critical, decolonial, and embodied perspectives through a set of necessary criteria, rather than claiming to originate those perspectives or to document their general adoption across SfD.

The four criteria specified in Section 2.2 distinguish connected but different questions, and their conjunction matters: influence in one domain does not establish influence in the others. The tests specify these distinctions without constituting a validated measurement instrument.

Relative to Sport Consciousness (Ponciano Núñez, 2025b), the present review makes those distinctions explicit and connects them to embodied knowing and epistemic authority. Situated Olympism (Ponciano Núñez, 2026a) supplies an illustration of contextual re-signification (Ponciano Núñez et al., 2026), while the extension into leisure offers a related conceptual development (Ponciano Núñez, 2026b). These connected contributions clarify the proposal’s genealogy; they do not provide independent confirmation of its explanatory value.

The synthesis consequently treats consciousness as a question of how pedagogical worlds become open to interpretation and authorship. Its scope is conceptual: to make relationships among recognition, decision-making, ethical meaning, and bodily knowledge available for examination. The next step is to investigate where these relationships converge, where they diverge, and whether the proposed distinctions remain useful in settings beyond those discussed here. Such investigation could refine or challenge the framework, including the claim that its four criteria are necessary in combination.

9. Implications for Youth Research and Practice

The proposed orientation invites research and practice to examine how young people participate in defining and interpreting development. The implications below are possibilities arising from a conceptual synthesis, not tested recommendations or a programme manual. Their relevance could vary with participants’ circumstances, institutional responsibilities, available resources, and the questions a programme seeks to address.

Conventional indicators remain necessary in many youth policy and funding environments. Attendance, school engagement, health measures, or employment indicators can provide accountable information about specified objectives. Their use is compatible with asking which aspects of experience they illuminate and which lie outside their scope. Evaluation could complement such indicators with participant-defined questions and accounts of meaningful change. Trust, belonging, or influence over decisions are possible topics for exploration, not outcomes assumed to occur or universal measures of success.

Section 6 and Table 3 outline possible methodological routes. The practical question is not which method is intrinsically superior, but whether evidence can enter interpretation and decision-making. Researchers and participants could compare institutional categories with young people’s accounts and record where meanings converge or remain contested. Participant-defined indicators would not by themselves demonstrate shared authority if their interpretation or use remained institutionally fixed.

For facilitators, the proposal suggests reflection on how expertise and adult responsibility are exercised. Relevant work with refugee-background and care-experienced young people shows the value of dialogical and relational practice (Hudson et al., 2023; Quarmby & Luguetti, 2023). Facilitators could examine which interpretations they privilege, which decisions can be shared, and how disagreement is handled. This is a possible enactment of the framework, not a validated competence profile.

For organisations and funders, the analysis invites consideration of arrangements that could make participation consequential. Partnerships could create opportunities for young people and community educators to influence aims before implementation and revisit them as circumstances change. Funding could allow time for relationship-building, language mediation, and collaborative interpretation. These possibilities warrant investigation alongside their practical limits and resource implications.

For researchers, the framework suggests attention to positionality and age-based authority across the research process. Young people could contribute to questions, interpretation, and representations of findings through forms of collaboration appropriate to the setting. Such involvement need not transfer all analytical responsibility to participants; it could instead make the allocation of interpretive authority explicit and keep disagreement visible.

Future inquiry could test the framework rather than assume its value. Comparative studies could ask whether the four criteria remain analytically distinguishable, whether they operate together, and whether their proposed conjunction is useful across settings. Research could also examine constraints, unintended effects, and cases that challenge the framework. The invitation is to explore recognition, embodied knowing, and negotiated futures while keeping the proposal answerable to empirical evidence and to the experiences it seeks to illuminate.