What Counts as Climate Spending? Expenditure Attribution and Accountability in Viet Nam's Public Budgets

When a government wants to fight climate change, it must first decide how much of its money is actually being spent on that fight. This is not a simple matter of adding up receipts. A single budget item, such as a new road or a flood barrier, often serves many purposes at once: it might move people, boost the local economy, and also help the community survive rising seas. The challenge for accountants and policymakers is to figure out exactly how much of that single project's cost should be counted as "climate spending." This process involves a series of judgments: deciding if a project qualifies at all, determining how strongly it relates to climate goals, and then calculating what portion of the total cost gets labeled as climate-related. These decisions matter deeply because the final number tells the public and international donors how serious a country is about its environmental promises. If the rules for counting are unclear, or if the path from the original budget to the final climate total cannot be followed, then the reported number loses its power to hold leaders accountable.

Researchers from Thanh Dong University in Vietnam set out to examine exactly how this counting happens in practice. They looked at the public records of three provinces—An Giang, Bac Ninh, and Quang Nam—over a ten-year period from 2010 to 2020. Their goal was not to see if the money was spent well or if the projects actually reduced climate risks, but to trace the paperwork itself. They wanted to know: if you see a final number claiming to be the "climate budget," can you work backward to see how that number was created? Can you find the original project, the specific rules used to judge it, and the math that turned the original cost into a climate figure?

The study focused on a specific government review process called the Climate Public Expenditure and Investment Review. In this system, officials take existing budget items and sort them into categories. Some categories are purely about climate, while others are mixed. For the mixed ones, the system uses a "relevance" scale. Imagine a project is judged to be partly about climate and partly about general development. The rules say that if a project is "highly relevant" to climate, it might get a score of 75 to 99 percent, and the midpoint of that range is used to calculate the climate portion. If it is only "low relevance," the score is much smaller. The researchers found that this method turns a single, fixed amount of money into a different, policy-specific number. The original cost of the road or the school does not change, but the amount that gets reported as "climate spending" changes based on the judgment of its relevance.

The researchers discovered that while the general rules for this process are clear and public, the ability to trace specific numbers back to their source is uneven. They could easily see the official guidelines and the broad totals for each province. For example, they could see that in Bac Ninh, the total climate budget over the decade was recorded as nearly 6 trillion Vietnamese dong, while in Quang Nam it was nearly 10 trillion. They could also see how these totals were broken down by different pillars, such as "resilient society" or "policy and governance." However, when they tried to follow the path for individual projects, the trail often went cold. In some cases, the public reports showed a final total, but the detailed list of every single project and its specific relevance score was missing. Without those details, an outsider cannot verify how the final number was built.

In one specific instance involving the Bac Ninh province in 2018, the researchers found a gap that the public documents could not explain. The sum of the smaller parts reported in the document did not add up to the final total shown. The difference was significant enough to raise a question, but the report did not provide the missing pieces to solve the puzzle. Similarly, in An Giang, the report claimed that a certain percentage of the budget came from foreign aid, but the numbers in the detailed tables did not match that percentage. The researchers could not tell if this was a simple mistake, a different way of counting, or a gap in the reporting. They concluded that while the rules exist, the documentation required to prove that those rules were followed for every single project is often incomplete.

This does not mean the government is hiding anything or that the numbers are wrong. It simply means that the "paper trail" is not always complete enough for an outsider to reconstruct the entire story. The study highlights a specific type of accountability problem: it is not about whether the money was stolen or wasted, but whether the story of how a number was created can be fully told. The researchers found that the process of turning a regular budget item into a climate figure is a form of accounting valuation. It is a way of describing an existing amount of money in a new, policy-focused way. The value of the money itself does not change, but its identity in the report does.

The implications of this finding are practical for anyone who reads government reports. It suggests that a precise-looking number on a page, such as a total climate budget, might not have a fully visible history behind it. The rules for how to count are public, and the big totals are clear, but the step-by-step journey for individual projects is often obscured by missing details. For the public and for independent reviewers, this means that seeing a report is not the same as being able to check the work. The study recommends that governments should keep better records that link the original project cost directly to the final climate label, including the specific relevance score and the math used. This would not prove that the spending was effective, but it would allow people to see exactly how the claim was made.

Ultimately, the paper reveals that counting climate spending is as much about documentation as it is about money. The researchers showed that in Vietnam, the system is capable of producing large, detailed reports, but the ability to trace every single number back to its origin is limited. The rules are there, and the totals are calculated, but the bridge between the two is sometimes broken. This leaves a gap in public understanding: we can see the destination, but we cannot always see the path taken to get there. The study concludes that for climate finance to be truly accountable, the focus must expand beyond just reporting the final totals to ensuring that the entire chain of decisions leading to those totals is visible and understandable to everyone.