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

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 contribute to the broader dialog on GCs by integrating existing IS theoretical perspectives and concepts with complementary theories from management and beyond. Our framework also informs and enriches GC phenomenon-specific IS research by helping to generalize the research questions and allowing for cross-phenomenon mapping of critical study insights. More broadly, the pursuit of the research agenda proposed here, along with entering a broader GC conversation with other disciplines and stakeholders, may speed the identification and enactment of effective solutions to grand challenges.