Ever since it was established in 1957, the European Union (EU) increased in both membership and power and it has been acting well as a unique supranational international organization. Meanwhile, the EU has been faced with both external (globalization) and internal (integration but diversity) challenges. In order to prepare itself for these new challenges, EU sets sustainable development as one of the fundamental objective. In the new century, to ensure a sustainable development, the EU set a decennial strategy—the Lisbon Strategy in 2000. The Lisbon Strategy aimed at coordination of economic, social and environmental development by accelerating structural reforms. Since then, the soft governance within EU came into force and the Open Method of Coordination was widely used. The Lisbon Strategy extended to cover various policy areas. After a 5-year implementation, Lisbon strategy was relaunched in 2005 during the mid-term review. In 2008, the Lisbon Strategy was renewed again because of the global economic crisis. Due to the strategic schedule, the European Commission made assessment of the Lisbon Strategy in 2010. However, though getting through a number of difficulties, the Lisbon Strategy is still proved to be rather disappointing for the European Commission. Though EU failed in most its goals, it did start a new governance model—soft governance for EU’s sustainable development. In order to be more flexible externally and stronger internally, the European Commission, based on the achievements of the Lisbon Strategy, proposed a new strategy—Europe 2020 Strategy as a successor. However, the new Europe 2020 Strategy also drew lessons from its predecessor, modifying its governance as well as implementation. The Europe 2020 Strategy is a huge social project with more defined goals, more systematic framework, stronger governance, more enhanced instruments as well as more players. The economic governance is well developed in this new strategy. Above all, this thesis will not limit to the Lisbon Strategy and Europe 2020 themselves but try to draw some lessons from them in soft governance, and then further to the new soft governance model for EU’s pursuit of sustainable development.