Social Innovation: Local Solutions to Global Challenges. A Review and Research Agenda

Social innovation has moved from the margins of academic debate to the centre of scholarly and policy conversations about how societies can respond to grand challenges such as climate change, inequality, ageing populations, and economic instability. Yet the field remains fragmented across disciplines, and the mechanisms through which locally rooted initiatives generate solutions of global relevance are still poorly integrated. This article presents a comprehensive review of the literature on social innovation as a locally driven response to global challenges. The review is designed as a comprehensive domain-based review, covering the field across its disciplinary traditions over the period from 2003 to 2025 and drawing on high-quality peer-reviewed research identified through citation tracking from landmark contributions and prior reviews and through targeted searches for critical and Global South scholarship, yielding a final corpus of 73 studies. The synthesis is organised around five thematic pillars that mirror the intellectual architecture of the field: the local emergence of social innovation, social entrepreneurship, social finance and outcome-based instruments, cross-sector collaboration and collaborative governance, and the scaling of local solutions toward systemic impact. Integrating these pillars, the article proposes a framework that conceptualises the relationship between local and global levels as recursive rather than linear. The review shows that the field has matured theoretically yet remains empirically skewed toward single case studies in the Global North, weakly comparative, and inconclusive about impact. Building on the Theory, Context, Characteristics, and Methods framework, the article develops a research agenda that identifies priorities for future inquiry and offers implications for scholars, practitioners, and policy makers engaged in mobilising local solutions for global challenges.