This special issue celebrates and maps out the ‘coming of age’ of community health psychology, demonstrating its confident and productive expansion beyond its roots in the theory and practice of small-scale collective action in local settings. Articles demonstrate the field’s engagement with the growing complexity of local and global inequalities, contemporary forms of collective social protest and developments in critical social science. These open up novel problem spaces for the application and extension of its theories and methods, deepening our understandings of power, identity, community, knowledge and social change – in the context of evolving understandings of the spatial, embodied, relational, collaborative and historical dimensions of health.