A cocoa farmer in Ghana's Ashanti Region wakes to news that will reshape her livelihood. The European Union, destination for 62% of Ghana's cocoa exports, now requires proof that her beans come from a GPS-mapped plot, that she has legal documentation for land her family has farmed for generations, and that no forest was cleared after December 2020. Without this proof, her cocoa cannot enter the EU market. She has none of these things. Neither do most of her 800,000 fellow smallholders. Welcome to the collision between Global North regulation and Global South reality.

The EU's Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) represents the most ambitious attempt to govern global supply chains through market access rules. Sub-Saharan Africa risks losing US$11 billion annually if producers cannot comply. But here is the puzzle: how do you implement a regulation that demands formal land titles when 80% of land is held under customary tenure? How do you trace beans to specific plots when half of all cocoa flows through informal intermediaries who mix harvests from dozens of farms? This project develops the concept of 'polycentric compliance' to understand what happens when Global North regulatory demands meet Global South institutional realities.

Through exploratory fieldwork in Ghana's cocoa belt, we will convene focus groups with cooperative leaders, certification body practitioners, traditional authorities, and NGO representatives. Supplementary interviews with senior officials will provide institutional perspectives. This pilot study maps initial responses to EUDR, laying the groundwork for larger-scale research. The project aims to produce a journal article for World Development or Regulation and Governance, plus policy briefs for stakeholders in Accra and Brussels. More broadly, it challenges the implicit universalism of governance theory by showing how compliance works when formal institutions are absent.