Sustainability accounting in Ghana: Conceptual foundations, regulatory evolution, and prospects for a resource-dependent economy

Abstract

This paper reviews sustainability accounting in Ghana, a resource-dependent, climate-vulnerable economy transitioning from voluntary practice toward mandatory disclosure under the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards from January 2027. Adopting an integrative, narrative review, it combines a documentary analysis of the principal 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 synthesis of the scholarly and practitioner literature on sustainability and environmental disclosure in Ghana and Sub-Saharan Africa, interpreted through the complementary lenses of legitimacy, stakeholder, and institutional theory. Ghana has assembled a comparatively advanced architecture spanning banking, capital markets, insurance, and the accountancy profession; yet practice remains predominantly voluntary, narrative, and legitimacy-oriented, concentrated among large and environmentally sensitive firms, with limited comparability, thin assurance coverage, and persistent capacity constraints. The coherence of requirements across multiple regulators emerges as a central implementation challenge. For regulators, the priorities are harmonisation and enforcement capacity; for firms, early adoption and cross-functional data governance; for the accountancy profession, sustained investment in preparer and assurer competence. In a setting shaped by mining-related degradation and climate vulnerability, credible sustainability accounting can strengthen corporate accountability and advance the Sustainable Development Goals, provided disclosure moves beyond legitimation toward substantive measurement. The paper consolidates a fragmented literature and sets a research agenda for an early African adopter of the global sustainability reporting baseline.