The role of internal capabilities and external pressures in sustainable energy management adoption in Vietnamese firms

Vietnam’s rapid industrial growth and weak environmental performance make firm-level sustainable energy management practices increasingly urgent, yet evidence remains limited on how internal capabilities, external pressures, and managerial experience shape their adoption in emerging economies. In this study, we investigate the firm-level factors that associate with sustainable energy management adoption in Vietnam. Using a capability-based perspective complemented by Upper Echelons Theory, we frame sustainable energy management adoption as a strategic decision associated with resources, knowledge, and institutional constraints. Using a sample of 899 firms from the 2023 World Bank Enterprise Survey, we apply both a logit regression model and a random forest algorithm. The logit model identifies significant positive associations between sustainable energy management adoption and factors such as firm size, R&D investment, international quality certification, and export orientation. We also find that managerial experience exhibits a negative nonlinear association with sustainable energy management adoption, a pattern consistent with strategic persistence. The random forest model provides complementary exploratory and predictive insights by highlighting patterns and conditional relationships, including the importance of variables such as manufacturing sector affiliation and foreign ownership, which the logit model does not capture as statistically significant. Taken together, the findings contribute to capability-based explanations of firm-level sustainability transitions by showing that SEM adoption is associated with internal capabilities, external pressures, managerial mechanisms, and conditional firm profiles. Our results suggest that policy interventions may benefit from sector- and firm-specific contexts when aiming to foster more sustainable firms.