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

Abstract

Policy/Practice-Focused AbstractDespite 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.