Given the fundamental national condition of “a large country with many smallholder farmers,” how to effectively align smallholder farmers with the goals of modern agricultural development represents a critical issue that must be addressed in the process of agricultural modernization. Village collectives, endowed with institutional status and social attributes, are expected to chart a practical pathway that effectively balances agricultural development with the protection of farmers’ rights and interests. While existing studies have examined both the positive functions and practical risks of village collective coordination, they lack a holistic analysis of its differentiated forms and divergent outcomes in practice. This gap hinders the identification of key factors shaping village collective coordination and thus limits the provision of effective guidance for village collectives to fulfill their positive functions.Based on the perspective of the mutual embeddedness of institutions and action, this paper constructs an integrated analytical framework of “institutional foundation, situational constraints, action adjustment, and outcome differentiation.” Taking the governance of land fragmentation in N County, Hunan Province as the empirical object, it conducts a comparative study of three typical villages. The study finds that the differentiation of village collective coordination practices is an adaptive autonomous action undertaken by village collectives in pursuit of maximizing coordination effectiveness. This action unfolds on the institutional foundation constituted by rural collective land ownership and the village self-governance system, and in response to different governance situations shaped by the intensity of external administrative pressure and internal functional demands for land. Specifically, under conditions of weak administrative pressure and strong subsistence demands, village collectives adopt multi-stakeholder co-governance, achieving orderly integration based on villager consensus through participatory deliberation. Under weak administrative pressure and strong development demands, the village collective enhances coordination efficiency through centralized decision-making and flexible mobilization, resulting in community-led coordination oriented toward local needs. Under strong administrative pressure, however, the village collective is more likely to adopt an administrative-led type of coordination oriented toward administrative tasks. This may shape a de-communization land management order and bring potential risks such as the infringement of farmers’ land rights and interests.Compared with existing studies, this paper incorporates both the advantages and risks of village collective coordination into a unified explanatory framework, further revealing the intrinsic relationships among institutional foundation, governance situation, and coordination practice. In doing so, it expands existing understandings of the factors shaping the differentiation of village collective coordination practices and corresponding underlying mechanisms. The analytical concept of “adaptive autonomy” illuminates the action logic through which village collectives navigate between external administrative pressures and land function demands in their coordination practices, thereby uncovering the internal mechanisms underlying the differentiation of village collective coordination across different governance situations. The policy implications are that, while preserving space for autonomous adaptation by village collectives, it is essential to avoid replacing internal community demands with excessive administrative pressure. At the same time, villagers’ participatory engagement should be activated to strengthen the public responsiveness of village collective coordination, so as to ultimately achieve a balance between equity and efficiency.