Social Innovation (SI) is a configuration of social practices prompted collectively and intentionally by multiple stakeholders in a specific ecosystem to solve problems that would be not effectively solvable through traditional approaches or practices by transforming the social and economic settings. Despite the literature around SI ecosystems has grown considerably in the latest years, what makes an ecosystem facilitator for transformative SI remains unexplored, especially in specific contexts and geographies, such as developing and emerging countries, where structural, cultural, relational, and power conditions differ from those of more powerful stakeholders enacting the SI initiative. Our research aims to fill such a gap by investigating the combination of characteristics – stemming from Stakeholder Theory and Knowledge Management – that enables local stakeholders’ autonomy in developing and emerging coffee-producing countries to increase the impacts of SI initiatives. We adopt a configurational approach through fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis on 18 projects of SI undertaken by coffee MNEs, NGOs, and institutions to favor an egalitarian value co-creation among local coffee farmers. That entails that farmers overcome being just the projects’ target to become the catalysts of local social, economic and environmental initiatives for change ultimately. We demonstrate that stakeholder empowerment, cooperative strategic posture, knowledge transfer, and local knowledge exchange are necessary conditions within the ecosystem for creating local autonomy as antecedent for transformative SI. Our novelty resides in suggesting a combination of characteristics that represents a virtuous process changing the rhetoric of firm-centric view based on stakeholder dependence to move to lower-power stakeholders’ interdependence and collaboration through a reconfiguration of relationships, advancing fresh perspectives on stakeholder and knowledge management thinking applied to SI literature. Eventually, we also propose practical ways to deal with the imbalance in stakeholder power, which the literature identifies as a factor that might limit the SI’s actual transformation and effectiveness locally.