Abstract: The increase of oil spill accidents has made significant impacts on life, property and the environment. Facing ever-increasing risk of disaster losses, how to cope with and response to large scale oil spill disaster effectively is becoming more and more important. And it is extremely onerous and arduous to develop a highly capable assessment technique to evaluate the effectiveness of emergency response system (ERS) for oil spill. An ERS for oil spill is a complex and dynamic system comprising a number of elements, one of which fails to accomplish its function would result in potential adverse impacts on the whole system. Evaluating the effectiveness of the system requires the consideration of all failures identified in the system simultaneously. Aims to propose a decision-making framework, this paper uses failure mode effect and criticality analysis (FMECA) to evaluate the effectiveness of ERS to make improvements in oil spill emergency management. It is achieved by analysing the components and bounds of the system, identification of generic failure modes which are considered as key factors of ERS for oil spill. And lastly a case study is demonstrated to validate the methodology framework.