External Ecosystem Resources and SMEs Sustainable Environmental Performance: Evidence from Ghana

Sustainable environmental performance (SEP) among small and medium-sized enter-prises (SMEs) has attracted researchers and practitioners’ attention. The achievement of sustainable environmental performance has been largely dependent on the prevail-ing external ecosystem conditions. Yet in emerging economies such as Ghana, there is limited research and evidence on the extent to which external ecosystem resources in-fluence sustainable environmental performance. This study aims to investigate how external entrepreneurial ecosystem resources including policy, access to finance, mar-ket availability, institutional support, human capital and culture influence the sus-tainable environmental performance (SEP) of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) using sample data from Ghana. Drawing on a positivist, deductive, objective, cross sectional design, we surveyed 386 SMEs manufacturing and service firms. Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) tested a multi-theory framework grounded in Resource Based View (RBV), Resource Dependency Theory (RDT) and Stakeholder Theory. The results indicate that policy, finance, institutional support, and markets exert significant positive effects on SMEs’ SEP. Culture and human capital were found to have weaker contribution to SMEs’ SEP. These findings highlight the primacy of structural over internal factors in resource constrained settings such as Ghana. We advance the RBV, RDT and the Stakeholder Theory by showing that external ecosys-tem resources act as critical environmental enablers for SMEs in developing economies. The findings offer globally relevant policy insights for advancing SDGs 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) and 13 (Climate Action) through targeted ecosystem interventions.