Policy responses to balance the trade-offs between nature conservation and socioeconomic developmenthave recently come to the fore in Ghana – the world’s second largest producer of cocoa. In 2019, theGovernment of Ghana introduced the Living Income Differential (LID), which requires buyers to pay anadditional US$400 per ton of cocoa on top of the floor price. With low farmer incomes identified as a crit-ical driver of multiple sustainability issues in Ghana’s cocoa sector, this differential is meant to be directlytransferred to cocoa farmers in response to the persistent challenge of poverty in cocoa farming commu-nities. Using the Q methodology, we engaged over 50 stakeholders from various levels (international pol-icy experts, cocoa sector stakeholders in Ghana, and cocoa farmers) to understand how the LID isperceived, including its potential to transform the rural poverty complex embedded in Ghana’s cocoasupply chain. While the LID is lauded for increasing producer price across the board, our findings indicatethat the lack of regard for farmer diversity (i.e., tenure rights, sharecroppers, and caretakers), farm size,and land management strategies (agroforestry versus clearing forest to establish farms) risks undermin-ing the ability of this pricing mechanism to reduce farmer poverty. Further, the LID is siloed fromon-going sustainability governance efforts in the sector, such as zero deforestation cocoa. If the LID isdelivered to farmers across the board without any quid pro quo for how cocoa is produced, the policy’sunintended consequences may include increasing deforestation in the short term, while lowering theworld market price of cocoa in the long term as cocoa supply increases. We conclude with policyimplications on why different perspectives matter in managing sustainability trade-offs in deforestation frontiers.