Determinants of SME Readiness for Participation in the Emerging Voluntary Carbon Market and Implications for Sustainable Transition in Vietnam

The Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM) is emerging as a complementary governance mechanism supporting global net-zero transitions. While small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) represent the backbone of most emerging economies, their organizational readiness to engage in carbon markets remains underexplored. This study advances the organizational readiness literature by contextualizing SME preparedness within emerging carbon market governance and sustainability transition frameworks. Integrating the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), this study identifies and prioritizes key determinants of SME readiness and compares readiness levels across three major sectors in Vietnam: Industry and Construction (IC), Services (SV), and Agriculture, Forestry, and Fishing (AFF). The analysis assesses five dimensions of readiness: knowledge, financial, institutional, managerial, and technological readiness. The findings indicate that knowledge readiness received the highest priority weight, followed by financial and institutional readiness. Sectoral analysis reveals that IC SMEs exhibit the highest readiness and remain the top-ranked sector across all leave-one-expert-out and criterion-weight sensitivity analyses, whereas the relative ordering of SV and AFF is more sensitive to panel composition. By revealing the relative importance of readiness dimensions and sectoral differences in an early-stage carbon governance context, this study provides policy-relevant insights for fostering inclusive low-carbon development pathways.