The path that has characterized the claim of ‘cultural rights’, and has given them content and meaning, is complex. Over time, the set of regulatory instruments has significantly grown, in parallel with important changes in the ways in which culture and cultural practices, their meaning and value, have been conceived. This has happened in the more general frame of political, social, and economic changes at a global level. The evolution of the rules, and of their interpretation and application, a ects the possibilities of action, leading to reconsider the actors, processes, resources involved together in the creation of the conditions for the recognition, pro- motion and guarantee of cultural rights. Taking into account that the right ‘freely to participate in the cultural life of the community’ has taken manifold contents, particularly as regard to the concepts of ‘culture’, ‘participation’, ‘community’, the need to deepen the relationship of this cat- egory of rights with the processes of patrimonialisation and with the conditions of sustainability emerges. In fact, what is acknowledged as deserving of protection and transmission to future generations, is always drawn from a selection process. That is a ected, on the one hand, by the aim of preserving identity and memory and, on the other, by the contribution that the heritage of cultural expressions can give, now and in the future, to the social and economic development of communities. Entitlements and responsibilities are increasingly becoming both diversified and intertwined, at international, national, local level, down to the individual, opening up to di erent forms of governance and of acquisition and development of the necessary resources, without which the e ective exercise of the rights to culture remains only on paper.