ESG Governance, Institutional Capacity, and Sustainable Cocoa Supply Chain Transformation: A Comparative Analysis of Nigeria and Brazil

Abstract

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) requirements increasingly shape market access and sustainability practice in cocoa supply chains, yet formal commitments do not explain why implementation remains uneven. This study examines how institutional-capacity configurations enable or constrain ESG implementation in Nigeria and Brazil. It uses a structured, focused qualitative comparative documentary case-study design and a core corpus of 30 documents comprising peer-reviewed studies, legal and institutional documents, and two earlier related publications. Institutional Theory explains external legitimacy pressures; Stakeholder Theory explains coordination and the distribution of implementation costs; the Resource-Based View is used as a bounded capability lens; and Sustainability Transition Theory explains learning and system reconfiguration. The comparative synthesis indicates that regulatory, technical, coordination, and adaptive capacities work as an interdependent configuration. Formal mandates or isolated programmes do not, by themselves, establish effective implementation. Nigeria shows emerging coordination and traceability responses alongside documented extension, data, and continuity constraints, while Brazil shows a more continuous research-extension architecture in selected regional evidence, without verified grounds for assuming nationwide traceability or uniformly superior capacity. The study conceptualizes institutional capacity as an enabling implementation mechanism through which sectoral governance systems interpret requirements, mobilize resources, coordinate actors, support producers, monitor compliance, and learn from results. Its contribution is a commodity-specific South-South explanation of divergent implementation pathways, including the risk that traceability pressures may exclude insufficiently supported smallholders.