Although great strides have been made towards a more nuanced understanding of the impacts and causes of global climate change, the ability to design and implement policy responses that engender effective action has remained insufficient. Recent framings of adaptive capacity and mitigative capacity are built upon in this article, and response capacity is introduced as a useful way to integrate adaptation and mitigation within the context of underlying development paths. In tracing the complex and non-linear relationships between response capacity - which represents a broad pool of development-related resources that can be mobilized in the face of any risk - and real policy and behaviour change in response to climate change, the strong influence of manifold socio-cultural factors is revealed. Only through an analysis of these deeper trajectories can the most important barriers to action begin to be addressed. Theories of risk perception are drawn upon to elucidate the complex nature of the relationship between capacity and action. A deeper understanding of these relationships will aid in the design and implementation of adaptation and mitigation policies that more effectively address the multitude of temporally and contextually specific intricacies of human behaviour in response to risks such as climate change. The literatures of institutional genesis and change, socio-technical systems, social movements, and collective behaviour change theory (to name but a few) are argued to be crucial to an improved understanding of the underlying development paths which influence both capacity and action.