Global hunger, poverty, exploitation of labor, illiteracy, infectious diseases, corruption, racism, migration of the productive workforce, inequality, gender biases, increased toxic emissions, biodiversity loss, and climate change are some of the important social and ecological challenges that the world continues to grapple with, with no satisfactory solutions in sight (World Economic Forum, 2016). These societal challenges have been labeled as “grand challenges” or wicked, complex, and multi-faceted problems that often cut across sectors in terms of relevance, significance, and societal implications and that require collective mobilization and action (Eisenhardt et al., 2016; George et al., 2016). Eisenhardt et al. (2016, p. 1113) describe grand challenges as “highly significant yet potentially solvable problems, such as urban poverty, insect borne disease, and global hunger that affect vast numbers of individuals, in often profound ways, and are typically complex with unknown solutions and intertwined technical and social elements.” Constituting fundamental social, economic, and political concerns, grand challenges have started to feature more prominently in recent management literature and have been captured in various forms of discourse and framing, most notably perhaps in the United Nations 2030 Agenda and its 17 aspirational goals for sustainable development (Gümüsay et al., 2020; Jamali et al., 2019). As Howard-Grenville (2020, p. 257) has argued, “while societal grand challenges might have once seemed distant from our ‘lane’ as organizational scholars, they will increasingly unleash consequences that impinge directly on organizations and work.” Indeed addressing grand challenges will be increasingly central to sustain our very existence as humans and it will be difficult for management scholars to buffer against further engagement. Certainly, the COVID-19 pandemic has done nothing but underscore this point (Jamali et al., 2020). Not surprisingly, through the duration of this Special Issue, which had a large overlap with the height of the pandemic, a torrent of essays and articles have hit both the ethics and mainstream management fields with pleas for reform and retooling research (e.g., GRONEN, 2020). These appeals are warranted based on Harley and Fleming’s (2021) recent systematic review of over 55,000 articles published in “top-tier” management journals between 2008 and 2018, finding that only 2.8% of articles addressed “grand challenge” topics. They attribute the main reason for this dearth to what they term “business school/elite journal gridlock,” referring to the norms of performance measurement that steer the focus away from the most pressing challenges that research should in fact address. Fortunately, BEER is gearing up to push thinking about grand challenges further by exploring new facets of the complexity and uncertainty inherent in grand challenges (Ferraro et al., 2015); and by honing in on non-Western contexts, providing an outlet for voicing grand-challenge conceptualizations and solutions originating from there (Zaman et al., 2020). It is worthy to note that grand challenges have escalated during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is illustrated for instance by the stark contrast between the increasing wealth of the elites by trillions (Forbes, 2021) on the one hand, and upwards of $3.7 trillion in losses for workers according to the International Labour Organization (ILO, 2021) on the other hand. Similar imbalances are observed in gender disparities at work in terms of women's higher unemployment rates, and, most recently, unequal access to vaccination for those living in the Global South (De Jesus, 2021; Zarrilli & Luomaranta, 2021). In fact, the UN has noted a significant slowdown in progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the aftermath of COVID-19 (Sachs et al., 2021). According to a recent UN report, the global poverty rate is projected to be 7% in 2030, which would mean the target on eradicating poverty will be missed; the pandemic led to the loss of the equivalent of 255 million full-time jobs; child labor rose to 160 million in 2020, which represents the first increase in two decades; and nearly half of the global population (3.7 billion people) are still not online (Sachs et al., 2021). In parallel, the study of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)—the responsibility of companies to go beyond legal requirements to attend to the needs of their different stakeholders—has grown in interest within the business research and practice spheres (Freeman, 1984; Jamali et al., 2015; Pisani et al., 2017). Nowadays, researchers and practitioners, whether in developed or developing countries, are becoming more aware of the normative and instrumental reasons for businesses to pursue socially responsible activities and to contribute in positive ways to the environments and societies in which they operate (Jamali & Carroll, 2017). Yet, despite this growing awareness and greater engagement with the responsible management and sustainability discourse across the business community, grand challenges continue to constitute major global challenges that exhaust not only planetary boundaries but also human intelligence, and scholarship has only begun to investigate their antecedents and outcomes across both developed and developing economies (Zaman et al., 2020). As aptly noted by Brammer et al. (2019), the lack of consistently applied conceptualizations of grand challenges is certainly problematic, and acknowledging the heterogeneity of grand challenges in terms of how they originate and play out in different contexts is an important first step to begin addressing them. The aim of this Special Issue is to encourage and support scholarship at the interface of CSR and grand challenges in non-Western contexts. On the face of it, the relationship between CSR & grand challenges should be rather straight-forward: Grand challenges are covered by the UN 2030 SDGs as the most influential, normative sustainable development agenda, and CSR is commonly portrayed as the business-level contribution to sustainable development (Moon, 2007). At the same time, the notion of grand challenges itself highlights the complex and intertwined nature of these problems, preventing easy solutions to be provided by the conventional CSR toolset and theorizing. Non-Western contexts then add yet another layer of complexity, as extant theorizing and empirical evidence have largely been geared toward developed country contexts. Indeed, developing country contexts have recently been recognized in the literature as mobilizing a different set of institutional arrangements, socioeconomic conditions, actor configurations, and problem structures (cf. Barkemeyer et al., 2018; Preuss et al., 2016). Non-Western contexts, therefore, provide fertile ground to explore the unique institutional sub-environments and the variegated social actors that can result in idiosyncratic effects on grand challenges nested within these contexts (Jamali et al., 2020). Hence, there is a real need to hone in on the conceptualizations of grand challenges in developing country contexts. Scholars need to identify the grand challenges prevalent in developing countries and to try to gain a better understanding of the specific constellations of actors involved in addressing them as well as the variety of mechanisms, activities, and processes that they mobilize, leading to potentially distinct patterns of institutional engagement and innovation around grand challenges in heterogeneous environments. Set against this background, the contributions in this Special Issue help to make a step toward capturing the peculiarities of grand challenges in developing countries, their context-dependent nature, the specificities of some of the issues encountered, and the solutions that are conceptualized along the way, encompassing context-specific processes and modes of engagement across a diverse set of socioeconomic environments. While one of the contributions is more conceptual/theoretical (Thakhati, 2021), the majority of the contributions to this Special Issue mobilize original empirical data, to shed light on various aspects of grand challenges faced in different developing country contexts. Particularly, Hennchen and Schrempf-Stirling (2021) explore the construct of Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives (MSIs) accountability in a Nigerian context, utilizing a longitudinal case study of two poverty-related MSIs involving the Dutch oil company Shell. They develop a process model of MSI accountability and argue for understanding accountability as a dynamic, multidimensional process, entailing the four criteria of transparency, inclusion, procedural fairness, and efficacy. Murphy (2021) studies MSIs in ASEAN countries zooming on a specific grand challenge that is endemic and very relevant across developed and developing countries, namely corruption. She examines how different socio-political contexts influence actors’ justifications and approaches vis-a-vis anti-corruption during MSI deliberations and ultimately, how this shapes the nature of the MSI itself. In turn, Pfisterer and van Tulder (2021) examine partnerships for development in post-conflict societies, choosing Colombia as their research setting. Based on their analysis of a cross-sector partnership for development, they identify the success factors of these types of governance arrangements. Among others, they find the interplay of formal and informal governance as well as the promotion of local ownership and the empowerment of small-scale farmers to be enabling factors for collaborative governance to succeed. Ishaq et al. (2021) report on a comparative analysis of sustainable consumption behavior in Pakistan and Italy, thus moving beyond the hitherto strong developed economy focus of this literature. They find clearly different underlying motivations for organic food consumption in the two countries, in turn allowing them to draw important implications for practitioners and policymakers. Basing their study in Kosovo and applying a needs-based framework, Grabner-Kräuter et al. (2021) shed light on the relationship between employees’ perceptions of CSR and their intention to emigrate. They find the two constructs to be negatively correlated, and mediated by the perceived meaningfulness of work as well as job satisfaction. Finally, by honing in on the development-oriented CSR literature, and combining bibliometric techniques with thematic analysis, the conceptual contribution of Thakhati (2021) provides, in turn, a timely and structured literature review of development-oriented CSR. He explores trends and patterns within this literature, identifies a number of inhibiting factors that have contributed to the flat lining of this important field of inquiry, and develops a set of recommendations to move the current literature beyond its current plateau. This is a very interesting contribution given the need to continue to focus on targeted development-oriented CSR in the developing world, and further to align this more forcefully with addressing the most pressing and relevant grand challenges faced in these contexts. We believe these contributions will certainly help to move the needle and advance what we know in relation to grand challenges and how they play out in developing countries, although we do acknowledge as well the need to push for more scholarship on this important topic. There is no doubt that grand challenges, both in developed and developing countries, are here to stay. BEER will continue to provide a developmental outlet for research on the antecedents, outcomes, and possible remedies for grand challenges. This Special Issue is a stepping stone toward increasing empirical and theoretical knowledge about the grand challenges nested within developing countries. Zooming in on varied developing country contexts (e.g., Pakistan, Kosovo, Colombia, and ASEAN countries), we hope that, through this Special Issue, we are able to provide some initial insights regarding the types of issues faced, the scale and scope of these issues, the actors involved, the peculiar challenges encountered, and the solutions envisaged. We hope that these insights will be relevant to researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. We also hope that this Special Issue will ignite curiosity and will provide the trigger for more impactful research addressing grand challenges, which as we posit above are likely to be increasingly central to sustain our very existence as humans within the framework of human rights, justice, equality, and strong institutions envisioned by the UN. We need to continue to share and contribute to this UN aspiration and to push the boundaries of management scholarship to keep up with the theoretical and empirical work that is required to make sure that we progress in the right direction.