Regulators often face regulatory failures. While they may occur because of regulatees’ inappropriate compliance behavior, they sometimes happen because of ill-designed regulatory design. In this paper, we argue that certain regulatory approaches are more suitable than others depending on the regulatory problem, the regulatory objectives and the enforcement capacities. Because it is the regulatory design that influences regulatees’ behavior, its careful design is very important to the success of a regulation. This paper disentangles different types of regulatory approaches during the rule-setting and rule-enforcement phases of the regulatory cycle. Even if it is ultimately a choice of the rule-maker, some approaches theoretically fit best with certain objectives and should contribute, if applied properly, to more effective governance. This paper focuses more particularly on the regulatory command (or design) – what the regulator instructs the target to do or to refrain from doing – which can take the form of means (traditional approach) or ends (more flexible approaches) – and the enforcement of consequences – how regulator sanction targets who do not follow the command (Coglianese & Mendelson, 2010). Based on accumulated knowledge, we also develop a decision tree to support rule-makers in choosing the approach that fits best with the regulatory environment they are facing. This decision tree considers three important questions: (1) What is the regulatory problem?; (2) What level of freedom do we want to give to regulatees?; (3) How do we want to / can we enforce regulation?.