In recent years, increasingly strict restrictions on ship emissions and continuously increasing prices of marine fuel oil have made the liquefied natural gas (LNG) using as a marine fuel more attractive, and LNG fuelled ships have therefore become more popular in many countries. However, there is still not much research on the development level of LNG fuelled ships in different countries, and no unified or corresponding evaluation criteria has been established to support relevant policy making, revealing a significant research gap to be fulfilled. In view of this, taking the advantages of the PEST (Political, Economic, Social and Technological factors) and the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis, this paper proposes a novel SRETI (Strategy, Regulation, Economics, Technology and Infrastructure) model for evaluating the development level of LNG fuelled ships in a particular region or country for self-assessment or comparative studies. The kernel of the model consists of the combination of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method and the evidential reasoning (ER) approach, thus being able to deal with evaluation data of both quantitative and qualitative features. China, Norway and the United States of America (USA) are selected in a real case study to demonstrate the feasibility of the model on the evaluation of the development of their LNG fuelled ships. The findings show that Norway is better than USA and China in terms of the development level of LNG fuelled ships. It is also revealed that the proposed SRETI model is capable of addressing uncertainties in subjective data provided by domain experts. A sensitive analysis is conducted as well to test the robustness of the SRETI model, and the results are in harmony with the axioms and hypotheses. This work provides policymakers with powerful insights into the development of LNG fuelled ships. It can also be tailored to evaluate the development of emerging technologies in other sectors. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd