Paola has nearly twenty years of experience supporting participatory planning in both the Andean and Amazonia regions of Ecuador. In community mapping and social documentation, she has found the ideal processes to nourish both transparency and a dialogue among diverse forms of knowledge, interests and concerns about a shared territory. Paola has accompanied mapping processes to obtain legal title to ancestral domains and to develop planes de vida (life plans), management plans and all types of plans supporting the viewpoints of communities versus those of local, provincial and national governments. She also carried out research on agricultural topics as they relate to culture, environment and society. Working with diverse NGOs and universities, she found that a strong and concrete exercise of collective human rights is both the existence (and resistance) of territories and the gender perspective over such territories. Since 2015, she is President of ALDEA, a Member of the ICCA Consortium.