Cultural buffering in entrepreneurial city diplomacy: Wuxi’s economic engagement abroad

Why do investment-oriented municipal delegations begin with culture? This article develops cultural buffering to explain how municipal actors use cultural forms and assets when development-oriented diplomacy brings together organisations with different authority, timetables and commitments. The analysis draws on multi-sited ethnography of 5 Wuxi delegation circuits across Japan, the United Kingdom and continental Europe, followed by tracing of 21 initiatives to July 2026. It identifies two recurrent problems: municipal schedules can outrun partner learning and due diligence, while demands for visible outputs can exceed commitment and post-event ownership. Municipal actors respond to these temporal and accountability mismatches through naming, sequencing, coalition broadening and managed ambiguity. These moves can change who participates, what becomes discussable, which organisations enter the relationship and how provisional alignment is recorded. Subsequent project implementation depends on authority, resources, delivery capacity and an organisation willing to own the next step. Cultural buffering therefore identifies the encounter-level work through which an unsettled proposal becomes discussable and revisitable before its implementation is determined.