Policies and Legal Framework on Green Building Development in Vietnam

Green buildings play an important role in advancing sustainable development objectives. Although green building development in Vietnam has made progress in recent years, the existing policy and legal framework remains fragmented and incomplete. Previous studies have mainly addressed development barriers, project management, and several green building assessment systems, while the establishment of a coherent policy and legal framework for green building development in Vietnam from a comparative legal perspective has not received sufficient attention. Therefore, this article addresses the following research question: what policy and legal reforms, informed by the experience of Singapore and Japan, could improve Vietnam’s legal framework for green buildings? To answer this question, the article examines green building development in Vietnam, analyzes relevant policies and laws in Singapore and Japan, and identifies the key limitations of Vietnam’s current framework. On that basis, the article proposes three main groups of reforms: (i) establishing a roadmap for the mandatory application of green building requirements to specified categories of buildings, (ii) establishing a unified national assessment and certification system, and (iii) developing clear, accessible, and predictable incentive mechanisms linked to green building certification and actual building performance, thereby contributing to the improvement of the policy and legal framework and promoting the sustainable development of green buildings in Vietnam.