ICDSS was founded in December 2012 at a meeting held at Schloss Marbach, Germany and funded by the Jacobs Foundation, Zurich, Switzerland.
Until 2020, the consortium was managed by a five-member committee, the Secretariat.
The Secretariat included Anne Petersen, Lonnie Sherrod, Rainer Silbereisen, Jenifer Lansford, and Frosso Motti-Stefanidi.
At the 2019 SRCD meeting in Baltimore, representatives of Developmental Science Societies which are members of ICDSS decided to create the Governance structure moving forward and to elect Executive Council Officers. The elections took place online in July 2020.
Consensus Conference
An important past event was the Consensus Conference organized in February 2017 by Anne Petersen, University of Michigan, USA, together with Rainer Silbereisen, University of Jena, Germany. The consensus conference was hosted by Marcel van Aken in Utrecht, the Netherlands. It was supported by SRCD small grant and financial contributions from some of the other member societies.
The three topics addressed at the conference were:
- (a) trauma following disaster and conflict,
- (b) migration and immigration, and
- (c) climate change effects on human development.
The consensus conference addressed two ICDSS goals:
- (a) to facilitate collaborative developmental research across topics and age groups and
- (b) to assemble and disseminate research of relevance to global policy.
Working groups from the consensus conference each developed policy briefs and worked on articles. Work resulting from the consensus conference was presented at an invited symposium, chaired by Marcel van Aken and Anne Petersen, at the ISSBD 2018 conference, Gold Coast, Australia.
Based on background papers submitted by ICDSS member societies, the Secretariat decided to initiate collaborative research and the development of policy recommendations on three topics:
- Immigration/Migration
- Disasters/Trauma
- Sustainability (including global climate change)
Most of these background papers recommended that collaborative developmental research is needed to study these issues from an ecological perspective over the lifespan, because the extant literature provides bits of knowledge on specific populations in specific circumstances yet global policy requires a more comprehensive perspective.