Interorganizational partnerships are a key mechanism to address grand challenges including climate change, poverty, energy security, and health crises. These partnerships are beset with paradoxes and must thus continuously respond to tensions at multiple levels. By studying paradoxical tensions and the responses to these tensions across the various levels of an interorganizational partnerships, this thesis traces the movement of paradoxical tension across levels and over time showing consequences for Grand challenges. Specifically, this longitudinal case study of interorganizational actors addressing the grand challenge of renewable energy in emerging economies, shows – in contrast to existing studies – that tensions continuously move between the individual, organizational, and interorganizational levels of the partnership in non-linear movements. This study explains these non-linear movements and highlights the implications for interorganizational partnerships and their ability to address grand challenges. Specifically, the research shows how critical incidents, can occur at any level, making tensions salient, sometimes at multiple levels simultaneously, with tensions then moving dynamically between various levels of the partnership based on how paradoxes are experienced and responded to by actors. The simultaneous dynamic movements, experience and response to paradoxical tension can provide an explanatory mechanism for how interorganizational partnerships are beset by paradox which in turn creates tensions and how the experience and response to tensions influences the focus on the grand challenge. Our narratives of dynamically moving tensions challenge existing depictions of paradoxical movement and highlights critical mechanisms in understanding the role of paradoxes in interorganizational settings.