Enabling Local Solutions to Global Challenges: The Interplay Between Paradox Knots and Paradox Salience in an NGO Working in Uganda

Addressing grand challenges confronts organizations with global–local and other paradoxes that can result in ‘paradox knots’ where responding to one paradox impacts another. Drawing on a longitudinal qualitative case study of an NGO operating in Uganda, we study how such knots impact ‘paradox salience’, i.e. their visibility and perceived urgency. We elucidate the knotted nature of two paradoxes: a global–local paradox and an identity elasticity paradox. Our analysis shows how the salience of these paradoxes developed inversely as the organization’s response to the global–local paradox amplified the salience of the identity elasticity paradox while its response to the identity elasticity paradox mitigated the salience of the global–local paradox. With these findings we contribute to the paradox literature by developing the concept of knotting mechanisms that tie paradoxes together and at the same time impact their salience within organizations. We explain how such mechanisms can produce different types of paradox knots and discuss what differentiates these types. We further contribute to the literatures that discuss NGOs’ local adaptation processes and identity elasticity by showing how the fluidity of organizational identity acts as a precondition for the local contextualization of development solutions.