The article examines the relationship between prior consultation and the construction of differentiated citizenship appropriate to multiculturalism as well as the conflictive construction of the institution of prior consultation in Colombian law, with the intention of illustrating in what way it has become a social field of dispute between diverse actors with diverse ideas about development, identity, and the common good. Finally, the article suggests some of the limitations of prior consultation as a way to manage socioenvironmental conflicts: the tendency to ethnicize the right to participate through this mechanism, the difficulty to recognize divergent epistemologies and temporalities, and to reduce the asymmetry of power and information between the actors that are part of the consultation process.