Fragmented public action and the limitations to coordinate national and local public policies with the involvement of citizens need to generate spaces and mechanisms for citizen participation linked to the planning processes of the different levels of government. In Ecuador (2008), citizen participation is a constitutional right of mandatory compliance for the entities and instruments part of the National Decentralized System of Participatory Planning. This study aims to analyze the normative aspects of the citizen participation system for territorial planning at the national and subnational level its opportunities. It challenges to promote the involvement of citizens in the formulation and updating of territorial planning instruments. To this end, an in-depth reading of national legislation is carried out, contrasted with the methodological guidelines of the official planning guides and information obtained from interviews with those who participate in the planning process. The results show that the structure of the participation model established constitutionally after a decade of operation has been limited to a legal process of mandatory compliance by the different levels of government. Participation spaces have been developed only at consultative and information levels. Then, there are no legitimacy processes of territorial planning instruments, which are necessary to implement normative and methodological adjustments that contribute to a new culture of the public planning to build the future development of the territory and its ordering.

Public participation in Ecuadorian land management has many challenges due to its effectiveness, since most of these processes have taken the form of social information meetings, where proposals are made, known as finished products, evidencing the lack of active citizen involvement.Added to this is the scarcity of tools and methods that lead to a compromise between democratic decision-making and expert scientific knowledge. In this context, these processes require a radical change in which new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are proposed as an alternative, valuing the knowledge and opinions of the population in relation to a given territory.New Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) recognize the existence of a new digital ecosystem in which the communication process is freed from the space-time factor, dissociating the experience from the physical space, and making virtual simultaneity and timeless fragmented space possible.This paper analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of using these technologies and their contribution to public participation in the land management processes in Cuenca, Ecuador, using Geographic Information Systems for Public Participation as a specific case.