Book excerpt: In June 2012 the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development adopted, as part of the main outcome document, The Future we Want, a call for countries to develop and enforce comprehensive national and local waste management policies, strategies, laws, and regulations. This call was a response to the challenges presented by unsustainable production and consumption, including the clear and unavoidable evidence of that unsustainability in the generation of waste. Increasingly, that challenge will come to be faced most acutely in developing countries. The objective of this guidance document is to help countries respond to that call: to develop and implement national waste management strategies, or, if they already have such strategies, to help them review, revise and update them.