The objective of the project is to provide the EU with conceptual tools and applicable ideas to make sustainable development an operational paradigm framing EU policy making in the globalization process. Broadening the utilitarian, state-centred, and market failure approach often mobilised in globalisation analysis, we develop a reflexive framework within which time and irreversibility, institutional path-dependency and multiple actors, with heterogeneous knowledge, beliefs, preferences, technology and power, interfere in the process of policy making. In this procedural approach, the policy making process itself will be scrutinised and integrated as a key determinant of the policy outcome itself. Within this renewed framework, globalization core challenges will be intersected with sustainable development conceptual challenges, which will be tackled specifically before nurturing back EU policy-making in the globalization process. The “ultimate test case for collective action” according to recent statement by Nick Stern - namely the governance of climate change and the bottom billion interlinked issue - will be used as an application case study throughout the project. The project’s main outputs are threefold: firstly, identify methodological tools to fulfil the empirical deficit in the measure of world citizens’ heterogeneous preferences across a range of sustainable development issues; second, develop conceptual tools to better understand sustainable development implications on EU social contracts and policy making processes; third, propose building blocks for a renewed dialogue on global governance within the EU and outside as “if sustainable development really mattered” to paraphrase Dani Rodrick.