Beyond Collaboration: Mutual Dependence and Power Imbalance in Addressing Grand Challenges

While the literature on mitigating grand challenges emphasizes the merits of collaboration to address them, mutual dependence and power imbalance in inter-organizational relations has received much less attention. In this paper, we focus on asymmetrical relations between actors, elaborate four ways to address grand challenges, and develop testable propositions. Then, we discuss how these four configurations – benevolence, collaboration, authoritarianism, and contention – may shift, or drift, from one type of relation to another. Our paper extends organizational research on grand challenges by considering mutual dependence and power imbalance between actors.