ADRIFORT project pursues a permanent partnership for the management of natural and historical heritage of coastal areas. The main objective of the project is the capitalisation and the start up of new initiatives suitable to support the institutions in the building of a virtuous model of preservation and joint cross-border management of the Network of the Adriatic Fortresses as strategic Cultural Heritage (CH) for a sustainable socio-economic development of the area of the IPA Adriatic programme. On the base of the past experiences, of the specific context of the IPA Adriatic area and in coherence to its already started internal planned guidelines-as well as to the most relevant EU policy recommendations - the partnership agreed to strengthen the capacity of the institutions to preserve and manage this specific cultural heritage acting on 4 directions: 1) start up of a renewed “governance and operative planning” of the Cultural Heritage en-powering on the expressed cultural values of the heritage, to the stimulus and the natural vocation of the local and European space, to the inclusion and to the active participation not only of the institutions, but also of the private sector and of the civil society; 2) the operational reuse of the Fortresses, overtaking the vision of a passive preservation and management of the Cultural Heritage (that is to say on the mere preservation of the asset along the time) towards a further model capable to interpret the cultural heritage as endless source of positive dynamic externalities of social economic and environmental order. These externalities constitute not only the key for the re-discovering of un-explored opportunities of the re-use of the heritage, but also of the sustainability and durability in the long term of the same project initiatives of recovery of the Cultural Heritage by the institutions; 3) facing the budget constraint for the recovery of the Cultural Heritage, proposing new management models, looking in a systematic and programmatic way to the combination of the local and National resources, and the initiatives in PPP and for the Europeans funds; 4) the overtaking of a local conservation/preservation/promotion of the CH looking to the opportunities of an action of cooperation and trans-national networking also through the utilization of the ICT. It follows that it is pivotal to work jointly in order to strengthen the capacity and the ability of the institutions to tackle these criticalities that features not only the specific heritage of the fortresses, but also the whole existent cultural heritage in the entire area of the IPA Adriatic programme: in this perspective the Project is an interesting and a relevant initiative suitable to launch effective ideas and solutions totally transferable and applicable in other context and typologies of cultural heritage of the Adriatic. Strengthen the capacity of the institutions to perform such a model of preservation and management of the Cultural Heritage means to intervene both in the set up of an “institutional framework” arranged to invest in that direction, both in the determination and application of new schemes and of new policy strategies and also of innovative operational financial- technical tools of support.