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Paper short abstract

This paper shows how Ghana’s cocoa economy is sustained through moral investment alongside market demands. It discusses practices that redistribute responsibility, uphold infrastructures, and stabilise value production in an increasingly uncertain world, thereby reconfiguring capitalism from within.

Paper long abstract

Cocoa production in Ghana is sustained by scientific authority, farmer livelihoods, and the national and global economy. Scientific recommendations, such as cutting productive cocoa trees to control viral disease, often clash with farmers’ immediate survival needs in a capitalist framework. Officers, scientists, and farmers navigate these tensions through waiting, silence, and respect to seniority. These are forms of moral investment: relational labour that redistributes responsibility, absorbs uncertainty, and keeps economic futures open without requiring constant technical or managerial intervention. Such authority functions as an epistemic and economic infrastructure. These practices make possible Ghana’s distinctive positioning within global cocoa capitalism, prioritising quality over volume, sustaining smallholder farming, and maintaining national economic credibility despite persistent infrastructural breakdowns. Situating this ethnography within debates on Africapitalism and ethical African capitalism, the paper presents moral investment as a constitutive condition of capitalist value-making. Responsibility, rather than profit alone, becomes the central object of investment. Moral endurance substitutes for technical certainty; relational authority substitutes for managerial control. As long argued in previous ethnographies, Ghanaian cocoa economy reveals a reconfiguration of capitalism itself, one in which moral labour, relational personhood, and more-than-human attunement are infrastructural to value production. By foregrounding moral investment as lived practice, the paper contributes an empirically grounded Southern theory of ethical capitalism. It demonstrates how African institutions actively remake capitalism’s conditions of possibility from within, offering us critical insight into how virtue, power, and economic futures intertwine in a polarised world.