The framework of the debate on the rights of holders of traditional knowledge is polarized between the regulation established in the Agreement on the Commercial Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights and the Convention on Biological Diversity, whose Ecuadorian counterpart is the Organic Code of Economy Social of the Knowledge that regulates the access, use and negotiation of the traditional knowledge of the ancestral peoples. It examines the effectiveness and coherence of this code with the right to selfdetermination through the analysis (...) of three aspects: 1. The legal category «traditional knowledge associated with biodiversity» 2. The underlying economic paradigm 3. The locks that block the materialization of the prior consultation. The rights of traditional knowledge owners need to be placed in the context of the right to self determination because they are ambivalent, they can be instrumentalized politically as well as they could be placed at their service. _Received_: 30 June 2017 _Accepted_: 11 October 2017 _Published online_: 31 January 2018. (shrink)