Significance Smallholder farmers make a significant contribution to food security in developing countries. Those farmer communities are experiencing new challenges owing to integration with the broader economy (increasing price volatility) and climate change (increasing frequency of extreme weather events). Our study aimed to understand how smallholder agricultural communities make collective action decisions in a public good game with different types of risks. Experiments performed in 118 small-scale rice-producing communities in China, Colombia, Nepal and Thailand show that increasing the integration of those communities with the broader economic system is associated with lower investments in public goods when facing collective risks. As such, the provision of local public goods may be negatively affected by market integration and climate change.