Beyond Local Resolution: Reporting Scope and Boundary Effects in Problem Solving

Problem-solving success is usually established within a bounded target, population, place, time horizon, metric, institution, or disciplinary frame. Such boundaries are necessary for research and practice, but a valid improvement within them does not by itself establish that the underlying problem is absent beyond them. Burdens may be transferred, transformed, delayed, redistributed, or adaptively displaced; evaluation may also hide what remains outside its own metrics or institutional frame. Benefits can likewise diffuse beyond the target. These possibilities are not new: closely related ideas appear in risk--risk tradeoffs, problem shifting and displacement, spillover analysis, boundary critique, interference, and proxy failure, with explicit discussions of cross-domain problem displacement dating at least to the 1970s. This conceptual synthesis therefore proposes no new class of effects. Instead, it develops a lightweight cross-domain reporting discipline for successful interventions: state the target problem, the scope in which success was established, the confirmed change, important known continuations beyond that scope, and materially relevant domains that remain unassessed; when needed, also state the evaluation method and a cross-domain handoff. We distinguish state-side nonlocality from evaluation-side nonlocality and illustrate the distinction with five cases. Finite continuation tracing is paired with a cross-domain continuity principle so that individual analyses can remain tractable without treating disciplinary boundaries as the end of the problem.