Abstract
Sustainability policies are increasingly integrated into national regulatory frameworks across developing economies, but adoption remains uneven among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This study investigates the interpretation and operationalization of government sustainability policies by Processed Food Manufacturing (PFM) SMEs in Lagos, Nigeria, a sector located within a weak institutional environment.
This study adopts Institutional Theory and Stakeholder Theory to conceptualize how coercive pressures influence organizational behavior, while stakeholder theory shows how SME owners/managers evaluate policy legitimacy, sector relevance and enforcement credibility. The study argues that having a policy alone is not sufficient.
This study adopts a qualitative approach, using semi-structured interviews with PFM SME owners and managers to probe perceptions of policy effectiveness, and the influence of stakeholder collaboration on their sustainability decisions.
Preliminary findings suggest that inconsistent enforcement and engagement drive selective compliance over substantive sustainability adoption. The study contributes to policy, practice, and scholarship by distinguishing between policy presence and implementation, by merging structural and interpretive explanations of compliance with sector-specific qualitative evidence from an underexplored context.
The shift in analytical focus from policy design to policy experience more broadly advances understanding of sustainability governance in weak institutional environments and holds implications for context-sensitive regulatory reform.