As global land degradation becomes increasingly serious, comprehensive land consolidation (CLC) has become a critical policy tool for effective land resource management worldwide. Effective multi-subject collaboration is essential to enhancing sustainable development of CLC. However, What conditions of multi-subject collaboration can achieve efficient collaboration is a key question in research multi-subject collaboration in CLC. Based on collaborative governance theory, this study builds a theoretical model of ”policy environment - collaborative foundation - collaborative motivation - collaborative dependence”, selects typical Chinese CLC project areas as samples, and by integrating fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and necessary condition analysis (NCA) methods, we investigated the complex causal relationships between various factors of multi-subject collaboration and the collaboration effect from the configuration perspective and revealed the configurational effects that produce efficient collaboration. The study revealed four configuration pathways lead to efficient collaboration: collaborative foundation-driven configuration, policy-dynamics-driven configuration, policy-structure dependence-driven configuration, and multi-factor-driven configuration. No single factor is found to be a necessary condition for achieving efficient collaboration. Our findings help enhance the research on multi-subject collaboration in CLC, providing theoretical and practical insights for developing and adjusting targeted collaboration policies to promote the sustainable development of CLC.