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

Abstract Climate-budget totals depend on recorded public-budget amounts and on decisions about which amounts count towards climate objectives. This documentary study examines those decisions in Viet Nam's Climate Public Expenditure and Investment Review (CPEIR), focusing on three provinces over 2010–2020, with 29 CPEIR localities providing context. It distinguishes eligibility, graded climate relevance and proportional attribution, and assesses the documentary recoverability of the relationships that support reported climate-related amounts. Formal rules and selected aggregates are retraceable; project-level applications and some reported relationships are only partially so. The study identifies an accounting-valuation configuration in which attribution changes the climate-related representation of a pre-existing monetary budget amount rather than its original value. It also specifies an upstream public-finance accountability question: can readers reconstruct how an amount came to count as climate-related? The claims concern reporting and documentation, not expenditure effectiveness or accounting misstatement.