Lisette van Beek

Climate litigation is growing and increasingly targets corporate actors. Scientific evidence is crucial in climate court cases, for instance to determine plaintiffs’ standing to sue or the attribution of climate impacts to the defendants’ actions. However, it remains unknown how scientific expertise influences court decisions, what forms of expertise are used, how evidence is contested, and how judges engage with this expertise. We address this gap by studying the contestation of scientific evidence in the Dutch climate case Milieudefensie cs v. Royal Dutch Shell. This case is notable for its heavy reliance on model projections, most notably those presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In this paper, we take a dramaturgical approach to reconstruct how litigants contested scenario projections. Drawing on Hilgartner's (2000) notion of stage management, we observe how plaintiffs and defendants deployed various dramatic techniques to enact and dispute the credibility and legitimacy of scenarios. The scenarios were most significantly contested by Shell, challenging both their credibility and relevance. Milieudefensie cs mainly questioned the scenarios' normative foundations. The case thereby signals that the role of science in climate politics is shifting, with the court room becoming increasingly important as a ‘stage’ where climate science is mobilised and contested. We conclude by reflecting on the shifting dynamics of climate politics; the position of the IPCC as crucial source of evidence in climate litigation, the limitations of models as key resource for climate litigation, and the emerging role of judges as gatekeepers of climate science.