Sustainability accounting in a resource-dependent economy: Institutional decoupling in Ghana’s transition from voluntary to mandatory disclosure

Abstract

This paper asks why Ghana’s rapid construction of a sustainability disclosure architecture has not been accompanied by a commensurate deepening of disclosure practice, and develops a theory-integrated explanation for the coexistence of stable reporting participation and declining disclosure substance as the country approaches mandatory adoption of IFRS S1 and IFRS S2. The study adopts a structured narrative review conducted with the procedural transparency of a systematic review and informed by PRISMA reporting conventions. It combines a documentary analysis of primary regulatory instruments issued by the Bank of Ghana, the Ghana Stock Exchange, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Institute of Chartered Accountants, Ghana, with a documented search of Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar and SSRN covering the period 2010 to 2025. Legitimacy, stakeholder, institutional and signalling theory are integrated into a single decoupling framework from which four propositions are derived and tested against the Ghana-specific evidence base. The findings reveal that Ghana has assembled an unusually dense regulatory architecture for an African jurisdiction, yet firm-level evidence shows that disclosure breadth has stagnated while disclosure depth has fallen. Among listed firms, alignment with the TCFD and IFRS S2 frameworks declined from 29 per cent to 19 per cent, and external assurance uptake halved from 50 per cent to 25 per cent, between 2023 and 2024, even as headline reporting participation held steady. This pattern contradicts a straightforward coercive isomorphism account and is better explained by institutional decoupling, in which symbolic, legitimacy-seeking participation persists while substantive and costly compliance is deferred ahead of the 2027 mandatory deadline. As a narrative rather than systematic review, the paper does not claim exhaustive retrieval of the grey literature, and its assessment of instruments whose mandatory phases lie ahead is necessarily provisional. The central empirical claim rests on a single practitioner survey and is treated as a motivating stylised fact rather than an established finding. The paper specifies a panel-based research design for testing the decoupling hypothesis across the 2024 to 2028 transition.. Regulators are advised to prioritise cross-regulator coherence, published reconciliation of competing materiality philosophies and investment in domestic assurance capacity over further expansion of reporting participation. The analysis also shows that even full success in the formal-sector transition would leave the artisanal and small-scale mining sector, the fastest-growing source of mining-related environmental harm in Ghana, outside the reporting perimeter altogether. The paper offers the first integrated account of Ghana’s regulatory architecture, its applicable theory and its firm-level practice evidence within a single analytical frame, and the first application of a decoupling framework to Ghanaian disclosure data spanning the period before and after the ISSB roadmap.