Evaluation of the "Export Initiative Environmental Protection" funding program of the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (2020 to 2025)

Environmental innovations and climate technologies are central pillars of German industry and the SME sector. With the "Export Initiative Environmental Protection" (EXI for short), the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (BMUKN) has been promoting German clean and green tech SMEs since 2016 for projects that support the transfer of know-how and the application of German environmental protection and resource efficiency technologies worldwide. Global environmental and climate protection can only succeed if the necessary infrastructures and legal, political, and administrative frameworks are also in place. The funding program strengthens the German clean and green tech sector (primarily SMEs) in implementing sustainable technical solutions for environmental problems worldwide in cooperation with local partners. As an environmental program with a clear economic focus, it promotes investment projects in the areas of: • Circular and resource economy • Water and wastewater technology • Off-grid green hydrogen and fuel cell technologies and • Innovative cross-sectional technologies On its tenth anniversary, EXI has documented over 200 projects with "GreenTech made in Germany" in around 100 developing and emerging countries, with a funding volume of 82 million euros. With its environmental focus and its comparatively flexible support profile, EXI bridges the gap between development cooperation and classic export promotion within the federal funding landscape. EXI has established itself as an important component of inter-ministerial cooperation – particularly with measures from the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWE) – and complements "classic" foreign trade promotion with a specific environmental focus. The subject is the second evaluation of the EXI funding program. The achievement of objectives, the effectiveness, and the economic efficiency of the "Export Initiative Environmental Protection" funding program are to be examined. An evaluation of the program should provide a well-founded assessment of the positive effects achieved, but also identify deficits, so that the contracting authority can optimize the design of future measures and programs on this basis. In 2021, EXI was evaluated for the first time by "Gesellschaft für Innovationsforschung und Beratung mbH" (IFGE) on behalf of the Federal Ministry for the Environment for the period from the program's start in 2016 to 2019. This first evaluation serves as the starting point for the second evaluation of EXI. The funding program has undergone several innovations in recent years and has been continuously developed. Key milestones included, for example, the introduction of the EXI tree-planting campaign, the new field of action for green hydrogen and fuel cell technologies for decentralized, off-grid power supply (since March 2021), the change of project executing agency for EXI in January 2022, the new program name "Export Initiative Environmental Protection" (until July 2021 under "Export Initiative Environmental Technologies"), and especially the focus of EXI in 2022 on investment components for more investment promotion in the GreenTech sector. The subject of the evaluation are the projects funded and implemented under the funding guidelines of May 21, 2019, April 30, 2021, and May 02, 2024. These include 75 individual and joint projects with a total of 94 sub-projects, which were approved by the BMUKN in the period 2020 to 2025 and whose project duration has ended. The majority of projects (over 70 sub-projects) have already been formally completed. The grant projects also include 12 individual measures, so-called country modules, which are to be part of the evaluation. These were commissioned by the BMUKN in the period 2020 to 2025 and carried out by the Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH.