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

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.