Local knowledge registers prominently in scholarly efforts to resolve environmental problems, ushering in widespread use of participatory practices of deliberation. Without the incorporation of local knowledge, many scholars contend that environmental science and planning remain beholden to the unbridled reign of the expert, and the daunting complexity of environmental problems remains seemingly impossible to penetrate. Following in this vein of work, we formed our participatory research project on nonpoint water pollution in two watersheds around four action clusters. On the local side, we included a cluster of farmers and farmland owners and a cluster of general community members. On the expert side, we included a cluster of researchers and another of government officials. However, we found in our research that the development of democratic deliberation depended more on whether participants situated and linked their knowledge than whether it was local or expert in origin. We suggest grounded knowledge, situating one's experiences in a way that enables participants to actively link with other knowledge, as a concept useful for scholars to better understand which ways of knowing enable deliberation in the participatory processes.

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Participatory grant making is a concept that can support decentralized decision making, shared power, and racial equity in Extension programming. The underlying philosophy of participatory grant making is to empower individuals and communities with flexibility and support to make collective decisions about financial resources. In this article, we draw on our experiences and provide concrete examples to demonstrate the power of this model for improving Extension programming and internal procedures. We conclude that the concept could be adapted for an array of financial decision-making settings to help Extension stay relevant and rooted in the communities we serve.