The cultural environment is both a tourism resource, an attractive factor for tourists to community based tourism destinations, and an impact on the sustainable development of the local community. "Building a cultural environment associated with sustainable development at community-based tourism sites" is the task of the Program "Building a cultural environment to meet the requirements of sustainable development of the country" implemented by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism hosted. In order to support the local community in accessing and implementing the construction of a cultural environment at community-based tourism sites, management agencies need to develop specific criteria for this activity. The aims of the article are to present the approaches, methods and research results of the Criteria for building a cultural environment at community-based tourism sites in Vietnam based on the theoretical framework for building a cultural environment which is generally specified in the Program. The set of criteria has been proposed with 6 main criteria groups and 51 corresponding criteria, this is the initial result of the research task, on which solutions to apply this set of Criteria at community-based tourism sites in Vietnam can be continued to propose.