Mediate. Connect. Develop.
Conmediare develops organisations willing to take responsibility — for their impact, their workforce and their future.
We advise companies, chambers and institutions in three fields that belong together: sustainability that reaches the numbers and the decisions. Vocational training that produces skilled people who can show what they can do. And organisational development that turns those affected into participants.
Since 2006 · Constance & San José · more than twenty years between European institutions and the reality on the ground
What we stand by
What is meant to hold grows from within.
A tree grows from its roots — and from everything around it: soil, water, fungal networks, the animals living in and around it. Most of what keeps it healthy is invisible. Organisations are much the same: what holds them up usually lies below the surface, in relationships, in habits, and in the environment they operate in. We bring that hidden ground into our work and derive from it ESG indicators that serve as a strategic basis for decisions. That is how knowledge becomes capability. With you, not for you.
Understand first, then change.
Anyone who wants to change rules and patterns has to recognise them first. Rules keep a system stable as long as they are lived and make sense — the craft lies in telling the load-bearing ones from the empty ones. Otherwise development turns into disruption, and leadership into instruction. Change that is meant to last needs people who can carry it forward themselves.
The measure is what remains.
It is not the final report that decides whether the advice was any good, but this question: is it still running once we are gone? That is why we do not only advise, we qualify — through training and continuing education that anchors the knowledge in-house. Systems we helped build have in some cases been run and extended by our clients themselves for over ten years.
The organisations we work for
Our clients share one interface: the one between a public mandate and private implementation. That is where impact happens — and where programmes fail when nobody understands both sides.
Four fields, one thread
Vocational training & skilled workforce
Dual training does not work because someone decrees it, but because company, learners and state find a balance none of the three can hold alone. We know that balance from the inside — as people trained in the dual system ourselves, as auditors of dual degree programmes, and from countries where dozens of competing models stood side by side and none of them held.
- Training as an ESG contribution. Apprentices and trainers identify environmental and social issues within their own company, implement measures — and those are carried into the sustainability report as indicators. The training you are investing in anyway pays off twice. A connection still missing from almost every ESG report today.
- Core-elements diagnosis. Which elements must a dual model have in order to hold over time — and which are missing in yours? A look at the underlying architecture, before anyone talks about numbers.
- From apprentice to manager. Permeability up to master craftsman level, so that companies can develop leadership from their own ranks — without the detour of a degree many cannot afford.
- Occupational standards and examinations. Taking new occupational profiles through to national certification, with a practical examination on a concrete case. Quality management for dual universities to DHBW/DHLA standard.
- Continuing education portfolios with learning paths. Modular programmes with a credit system, compatible with international qualification frameworks — which you run yourselves once the project ends.
- Learning partnerships between companies. Sector learning networks in which companies share their experience on a common topic — energy efficiency, supply chain, training quality — and get further faster than any of them could alone. Design, facilitation, and the rules that make such networks viable.
- Keynotes, talks and teaching. Talks on sustainability, dual training and learning architectures — for chamber events, specialist conferences and universities, in German, Spanish or English. Through our network we can also bring internationally recognised voices from climate research, biodiversity and the circular economy to your event.
- AI and digitalisation in learning architectures. New tools change who needs to be able to do what — and that affects the whole organisation, not just the HR department. We design blended-learning and AI-supported formats so that they strengthen and extend the training structure you already have. With specialised technical partners.
Sustainability & ESG
Sustainability is taken seriously once it appears in the same tables as revenue and risk. We take it there — across environment, social and governance, with the standards your reporting obligations require, and with the occupations that deliver your targets.
- ESG strategy and management in line with CSRD, ISO standards and the SDGs — with indicators that measure something you can actually influence.
- Climate, biodiversity and the circular economy: from carbon accounting to resource efficiency and nature-based solutions.
- Social standards, labour and upskilling. The S in ESG is more than a statement of intent: initial and continuing training of your own workforce, securing skilled staff, occupational safety and health, gender and inclusion, human and labour rights inside the company and along the supply chain. We develop charters, checklists and voluntary commitments together with the team that will later work with them — and take them from a legal and normative requirement through to robust indicators under GRI, SASB and the applicable national accounting standards.
- Nature conservation and landscape approaches. Assessment and recognition of conservation services, protected-area and landscape approaches, linking climate and biodiversity goals with local value creation — together with our global partners.
- Green finance and impact indicators. Building environmental and social standards (E&S) for banks, funds and programmes — with compliance, risk and impact measurement, compatible with IFC, World Bank, KfW, EIB, IDB and CAF. The indicators with which development finance enables and steers innovation today.
- Green jobs: deriving new green occupational fields from your sector, connected to nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and the taxonomy.
Organisation, leadership & fundraising
Structures change on paper in a week. In people’s heads it takes longer — and without the heads nothing changes at all. We work on both: on processes that hold, and on people willing to hold them.
- Organisational and team development, including in teams with a reputation for being difficult — across language and cultural boundaries.
- Governance and processes: responsibilities, transparency, and relationship management that does not depend on individuals.
- Fundraising and proposal development. Mapping the donor landscape, sharpening the impact logic, writing the proposals — and setting up the relationship work so that it stays in-house.
- Mediation, co-mediation and arbitration in multi-stakeholder conflicts — from the workplace to the extractives project.
- Support through technological transitions, so that introducing a system does not turn into a staffing question nobody had asked.
- Coaching and supervision. Systemic leadership coaching for managers in transition, career guidance, personnel selection and ongoing supervision — individually or in teams.
- Workshop and colloquium design. Formats in which work actually gets done: hybrid events, parallel working groups, panels and dialogue formats for international organisations and networks.
- Advisory and supervisory board mandates with responsibility for sustainability and transformation.
Building bridges: markets, delegations, partnerships
Between two countries there are usually two ways of understanding a deal. We translate both — not just the language. Most of all between the German-speaking countries and Latin America, where we have been at home for twenty years.
- Delegation trips and formats such as “Business meets Sustainability” — design, organisation, follow-up.
- Partnerships between chambers, companies and the public sector that get beyond the memorandum of understanding.
- Temporary leadership on site: interim management, setting up a branch office, representation in negotiations.
- Market entry and positioning, particularly in Mexico, Costa Rica and Central America.
“Those who understand how things connect can shape change — instead of being taken by surprise.”
How we work
Before we propose any measure, we want to understand what is already present in your system — and what is trying to emerge. Most undertakings fail not in the implementation, but because someone acted too early.
First contact
Trust and information on the personal, substantive and structural levels.
System analysis
Forming hypotheses, clarifying goals and roles, planning interventions.
Working phase
Coming together, widening perception, taking on knowledge.
Implementation
Acting, with feedback along the way, on site where needed.
Consolidation
Stabilising what has been achieved, exchanging experience, correcting.
And then, if necessary, from the beginning again. Slowing down and being efficient are not a contradiction: what has been properly understood once does not have to be rebuilt three times.
Groundwork that is still running
Sustainability training architecture — German Chamber of Commerce in Mexico (CAMEXA)
Starting point Practical training in sustainability reporting was almost entirely absent; more than thirty dual models were competing across the country.
Assignment Building the first sustainability department in the German chamber network abroad, a continuing education portfolio with the Inhouse Sustainability Manager as its through-line, and a credit-based learning path system; quality management for the dual university; linking dual training to the ESG reporting of member companies. Together with CAMEXA, introduction of the 800-hour industrial master craftsman with recognised equivalence to the German qualification.
Result Three nationally certified occupational profiles, among them Latin America’s first integrated sustainability manager and two high-voltage profiles for electric mobility. In 2021 GIZ transferred the ISM to further countries as international best practice; participants ranged from industrial and agricultural companies to hospitals — from automotive and chemicals through construction and textiles to food production. The chamber has been running and extending the system on its own ever since.
Green finance in a multilateral development bank — CABEI
Assignment On behalf of GIZ International Services, building the environmental and social standards across the entire bank: credit appraisal and risk management, internal processes and personnel practice, plus the accompanying training.
Distinctive feature Alignment with the IFC Performance Standards, World Bank, KfW, EIB, IDB and CAF — so that the bank can co-finance with other development banks and keep reputational risk under control.
Result Structural design for eighteen positions; sustainability as an appraisal criterion in every lending decision.
Chamber partnership in construction — CMIC, Mexico
Assignment On our initiative, the partnership between CAMEXA and the Mexican construction industry chamber came into being; with it, a delegation trip to Germany on sustainable construction, the circular economy and renewable energy.
Result CMIC is moving into dual qualification and turning its previously purely theoretical training into formats with practical transfer into the workplace.
Mercury standards in gold mining — policy work, Brussels and international
Starting point New technology made it possible to use considerably less mercury in gold extraction than the standards in force required.
Assignment Together with a partner from our network, policy and advocacy work in Brussels and at international level, so that the technically achievable values would make it into the standards.
Result What was technically possible became the rule for the whole sector.
Donor relations — ICTSD, think tank for trade and sustainability, Geneva
Starting point Donor relationships depended on the director and a few prominent figures; projects could not be compared with one another.
Assignment Restructuring with a unified project architecture, donor mapping, templates and quality standards.
Result Distributed relationship management — whoever writes the proposal also tends the relationship. Transparent processes that no longer depend on individuals. Ad hoc acquisition became a repeatable process.
Team development — large Swiss company, nationwide
Assignment Developing particularly conflict-ridden teams through a partner organisation, from Graubünden to the Romandy.
Result Teams talking to each other again — across four language regions.
Not a consultancy with floors and an org chart
Conmediare is a network. For each undertaking we put together the team it needs — from people we have worked with for years.
Emmanuel Winkler — founder
Lawyer · banker · systemic mediator & coach
Born in Togo, raised in Cameroon and Madagascar, at home in Constance and San José. Senior positions at the German chambers of commerce in Mexico and Costa Rica, at GIZ International Services and at ICTSD in Geneva; lecturer at HTWG Konstanz. Currently writing a book on the core elements of dual vocational training.
What drives me: As a student I founded an NGO that supported the establishment of the International Criminal Court — out of the conviction that rules are only worth something if they apply to the powerful as well. Sustainability is the same question in another form: whether we pay our bills or pass them on to those who come after us.
What I understand by leadership: You do not change systems with fear, and not with slogans. You distinguish what strengthens strengths from what weakens weaknesses, and you set that in motion instead of letting it seize up. Go first, with courage; name things transparently, even at the risk of being wrong. And then let the loop keep running: perceive, act, correct. Anyone who can correct at any time does not have to be perfect in order to lead. And anyone who also turns those affected into participants, and leads with empathy but with clear goals, creates something that cannot be ordered into being: spaces in which people want to, of their own accord. That, to me, is the kind of leadership innovation comes from.
- Deutsch
- Español
- English
- Français
Partners
For each undertaking we work with selected specialists — in vocational training, carbon accounting, digitalisation and law, in Europe as well as in Latin America. We will introduce them here shortly.
Joint undertakings
Out of our network come undertakings none of us could carry alone: jointly developed projects in nature conservation and climate finance, with access to international organisations and funds through our global partners.
Institutional partners
Earthmind · Global Nature Fund · Green Initiative · Global Footprint Network · ALIARSE · DAAD · HTWG Konstanz · UTN Costa Rica
Let's talk about what you need.
After a free initial conversation we analyse your situation and make you an offer that fits it. Call directly or write a few lines — no forms required.
- ✉e.winkler@conmediare.com
- ☎+49 151 155 155 61 · +506 8978 4250
- inLinkedIn
Head office
Seestraße 3
D-78464 Konstanz
Germany
Regional office
Torres Pinares
San José
Costa Rica
Consulting for sustainability, vocational training and organisational development — Constance & San José, since 2006.
Navigation
Contact
e.winkler@conmediare.com
+49 151 155 155 61
Constance · San José
Legal notice
Owner and responsible for the content:
Emmanuel Winkler · Conmediare · Seestraße 3 · D-78464 Konstanz · Germany · Tel. +49 151 155 155 61 · Email: e.winkler@conmediare.com
The texts and graphics on this website are subject to the copyright of conmediare. Any use for non-private purposes requires prior written consent. No liability is accepted for the accuracy, completeness or currency of the content. We have no influence over the design and content of external linked pages and expressly distance ourselves from them.
Data protection
How we handle your data – hosting, cookies, Google Analytics (only with your consent) and your rights – is set out in our privacy policy. Please direct enquiries to e.winkler@conmediare.com.
Congratulations. You are one of those people who open what is not meant to be opened.
You are in good company. Every development in an organisation begins with someone understanding a rule not as a wall but as a question. Curiosity is the engine of development.
And you did it in the right order: first you saw that there was a rule, then you checked whether it made sense. That is precisely the capability every change is about.
One boundary, however, is not a rule: nature’s. It can be crossed, often even cheaply — it is just that someone else pays the bill, later. The difference between a rule you may question and a reality you have to acknowledge is the core of what we call sustainability.
This is exactly how we work with you. Not by explaining from the outside what needs to be done — the knowledge has long been there inside your organisation. But by translating it into action: from knowledge management to capability management. Knowledge you have. Capability only shows once you do it.
That is what the name stands for too: Conmediare — advising by mediating. Between what is and what could become. Between your reality and your potential. And, as you have just demonstrated: between prohibition and curiosity.