The concept of physical literacy has entered policy, advocacy, and practice discourses in many countries and has become a significant focus of physical education, physical activity, and sport promotion. Despite its popularity, questions remain about the coherence of the definitions used and their impact on the capacity of physical literacy to act as a unifying and empowering idea. This contributes to efforts to understand and critically analyze definitional issues by systematically reviewing and analyzing patterns of use. The analysis identified 14 themes, organized into four meta-themes: physical, psychosocial, cognitive, and integrated development. The most common theme among the identified codes was movement skills, which related to developing motor competence and specific skills. The article discusses the diversity of themes and their implications for future research and practice in physical literacy. It challenges the common claim that progress depends on reaching a universal definition as the basis of collaborative work.

The study aims to explore the consensus-level strategic priorities for sustainable development from the perspective of decision makers in organisations responsible for governing international sport and how they cluster within the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development. We employed the three-round Delphi study with decision makers from international sport organisations. Based on the 29 semi-structured interviews in the first round, we inductively generated items for questionnaires for the subsequent two rounds. The process yielded 20 items representing strategic priorities determined by 20 experts in the last round. The highest ranked item was normative change, in which sustainability is prioritised throughout all organisational strategies and actions. Moreover, planned efforts that are part of a long-term strategy and embedding sustainability requirements at the bidding phase of sport events were considered with high priority. The 20 items clustered into four out of five levels of the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development, namely system, success, strategic guidelines and actions. No items could be assigned to the framework’s tool level, potentially indicating gaps of strategic consideration. The findings from the Delphi study add a forecasting element to the research and practice of strategic sustainability in the management of sport by revealing consensus-level strategic priorities for the future.

Physical literacy (PL) has become a popular term in international policy, advocacy, and practice discourses, and a part of this lies in its claimed role in bringing together traditionally distinct settings – physical education, physical activity, sports coaching (the focus of this paper) – into coherent research and practice agenda. However, questions remain about the coherence and commensurability of the definitions used within the PL field. This study explores the knowledge, understanding, and personal definitions of 521 sports coaches from 37 countries. Using Leximancer semantic software to analyse qualitative data from an international cohort of coaches, we sought to gather a relatively unbiased and trustworthy representation of their perceptions of PL. Relevance ranged from 100% for concepts 'movement,' 'physical,' and 'activity' to 8% and 6% for concepts 'coordination,' 'need,' 'control,' and 'efficiently,' respectively. The dominant accounts of PL in our sample prioritised movement skills and sport, in contrast to influential academic theories that stress multi-factorial constructs. These findings support arguments that definitions of PL are widely divergent and that the imposition of a unified conception of the term may be an unattainable and unnecessary ambition.