Abstract
Persistent structural and governance weaknesses continue to undermine enterprise resilience in many emerging economies. Despite significant institutional reforms, a diagnostic gap exists in identifying and prioritising these interconnected challenges within the specific socio-economic context of Ghanaian firms. This paper develops and applies a novel diagnostic framework to systematically identify and analyse the most critical structural and governance impediments to business resilience. It aims to provide a prioritised taxonomy of issues and propose a mechanism for targeted intervention. The study employs a multi-method design, integrating thematic analysis of longitudinal policy documents and corporate reports with structured diagnostic interviews with senior executives and board members from a stratified sample of enterprises across key sectors. Analysis reveals that governance deficiencies, particularly in board oversight and audit committee effectiveness, are the most frequently cited primary constraint, identified as the core issue in over 60% of sampled cases. This is compounded by structural issues in supply chain fragmentation and access to long-term capital. The findings indicate that resilience is predominantly constrained by a core-periphery model of challenges, where governance failures exacerbate structural vulnerabilities. A siloed approach to addressing these issues is likely to be ineffective. Enterprises should adopt integrated diagnostic audits using the proposed framework to identify their specific core constraint. Policymakers are advised to tailor support mechanisms that address governance and structural issues concurrently, rather than in isolation. corporate governance, business resilience, diagnostic framework, emerging markets, structural constraints This paper introduces a novel diagnostic framework that prioritises enterprise constraints by causality and impact, offering a new tool for targeted resilience-building in institutional contexts similar to Ghana's.