| dc.description.abstract | In 2016, the Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum and Energy was summoned to Oslo District Court by the environmental organisations Nature and Youth and Greenpeace Nordic. The legal proceedings that followed have since been known as the Climate Lawsuit (Klimasøksmålet) and lasted for four years. The organisations’ legal action initiated discussions on the potentially problematic role of the courts in policymaking, on the weighing of climate policies and national petroleum production, and on the urgent and disruptive nature of the climate crisis. This thesis is a practice-oriented analysis of a selection of the lawsuit’s court documents, and of the arguments made by its two parties: the environmental organisations on the one side and the government on the other. Specifically, I examine how the parties’ claims in the courtroom enact different versions of the climate change issue and its consequences for the Norwegian petroleum industry, and how they express different understandings of the possible challenges the lawsuit poses to the established separation of powers. Inspired by several strands of theoretical literature, such as actor-network theory, issue formation studies, and existing works on legal practices and the temporal and geographical aspects of climate change within the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), this thesis seeks to answer the following research question: How are different issues established and put to work in the court documents of the Norwegian Climate Lawsuit? | eng |