Tropenbos International, Tropenbos Ghana, Fern, EcoCare Ghana, and Forest Watch Ghana developed a briefing note, to provoke a conversation around how producer and consumer countries, including the EU, could use legally-binding schemes to tackle these governance issues. In so doing, the paper draws lessons from Ghana’s on-going Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) process, which has been successfully tackling governance problems in the timber sector for some years. In particular it explores how a bilateral partnership agreement – one of the options identified as having “high” impact by the 2018 European Commission feasibility study on agricultural deforestation—between Ghana and European countries could help encourage reform in the cocoa sector.