Judges’ Risk Work in Climate Litigation: Translating Plural Knowledges into Legal Responsibility in Brazil and the Dutch Caribbean

Abstract Courts are increasingly called to remedy political inertia on climate change, requiring judges to negotiate a plurality of risk knowledge(s) in allocating responsibility for climate harm – from climate science and policy-governance information to social-scientific evidence on vulnerability and community-based accounts. Drawing on the sociological lenses of risk work and relational risk, this article compares two landmark decisions: Greenpeace Netherlands and 8 citizens of Bonaire v. The Netherlands (2026) and PSB et al. v. Brazil (on deforestation and human rights) (2024). Through thematic document analysis, we trace how courts articulated techno- and social-scientific knowledges to identify new “risk objects” and “objects at risk,” redistributing legal responsibility to the State. In the Bonaire case, evidence on vulnerability positioned cultural heritage, health and livelihoods as objects at risk, while the State’s discriminatory inaction, read against the island’s colonial history, emerged as the risk object. In the Brazilian case, the Amazon forest remained the familiar object at risk, but the court reframed the risk object as a structural failure of governance, warranting a dialogical remedy. Judicial engagement with extralegal knowledge was shaped by procedural architecture, constitutional tradition and political polarisation. The findings contribute to Science and Technology Studies (STS) and socio-legal debates on the judiciary’s role as a co-producer of understandings of climate risk.