Digital Approaches to Societal Grand Challenges: Toward a Broader Research Agenda on Managing Global-Local Design Tensions

Policy/Practice-Focused Abstract Despite considerable and continued resource investments, effective solutions to broad-scope problems of social interest or societal grand challenges (GCs) have proven to be elusive in many domains. In multiactor situations that characterize GCs, divergent goals, needs, priorities, and capabilities of global and local actors create organizing design tensions that need to be considered before solutions can be enacted. Emergent digital technologies can play an important and transformative role in addressing the organizing design tensions that pervade such collective action problems. In this article, we draw on Elinor Ostrom’s principles of public value creation and identify a set of eight organizing design tensions that arise from employing global and local perspectives in addressing GCs. We consider novel digital approaches—that involve alternative arrangements of digital and socio-political elements in GC settings—to resolving each of these design tensions. Our discussion foreshadows the considerable opportunity for information systems research to contribute to the broader dialog on GCs; inform GC-related policy and practice at global and local levels; and, more broadly, speed the identification and enactment of effective solutions to grand challenges. Information systems (IS) scholars have pursued phenomenon-specific research to meaningfully engage with and contribute to addressing societal grand challenges (GCs). Although such efforts are invaluable, a broader framework that identifies generalized organizing problems in tackling GCs and reveals promising pathways for digital technologies to add value in addressing them could help establish an agenda for impactful IS research. In this article, we offer such a framework by drawing on Ostrom’s principles of public value creation and management research on organizational design. We identify a set of eight organizing design tensions that arise from employing global and local perspectives in addressing GCs. We consider digital approaches to resolving each of these design tensions and delineate a rich and diverse agenda for future research. We acknowledge prevailing socio-political structures and factors that may constrain the effectiveness of digital solutions and adopt a socio-technical design perspective to suggest alternative arrangements of digital and socio-political elements in GC settings. Our discussion foreshadows the considerable opportunity for IS research to contribu