Larry Kramer, outgoing CEO of mega climate funder the Hewlett Foundation, looks back on his tenure
Larry Kramer, former chairman of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, does not think it is healthy for an executive to lead the same organization for more than fifteen years. The problem, he says, is that it takes a decade for a leader to get anything done.
Nevertheless, Kramer, known for his early support of the fight against climate change, will meet his own deadline. At the end of 2023, he will resign from his position at the organization he has led since 2012.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Kramer explains how Hewlett became the world's largest climate financier from 2007 to 2018, and began financing cybersecurity, political polarization in the context of democracy and the reinvention of capitalism.
“We cover the entire field,” Kramer says of Hewlett's climate financing. “When we identify problems, we start working on them and people often follow suit. And that's true for a number of things in recent years, whether it's carbon dioxide removal, finance, there's a number of different areas.
Kramer, an expert on constitutional law, will later become president and vice-chancellor of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The Hewlett Foundation has launched a search to hire a replacement. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
I don't want to answer it in terms of specific policies, because there are a lot of specific policies that could do that. The challenge is to make them seem intuitively appealing and obvious to people. The neoliberal paradigm is definitely crumbling. I think there's almost a consensus that it has crumbled. The question is: what will take its place?
So when you think about the erosion of the laissez-faire paradigm in the 1920s and the aftermath of World War I and the Great Depression, it wasn't clear what would take its place. Many people became fascists, and many people became communists. I think we're in a similar period of uncertainty, which is a big part of the political unrest that you had then and that you have now. Such was the case in the 1960s, when the Keynesian order collapsed and neoliberalism finally took hold. That was not a given. So I think everything is being renegotiated. We see that the rise of authoritarianism and ethnonationalism is also filling this gap. That is not a good outcome. So we have to offer people something better
I think you can split the philanthropic contributions into two separate parts. One piece, the most common piece and the easier piece, is the piece that looks at specific problems and tries to solve them. We need to remove the barriers that prevent people from voting. We need to solve the campaign finance problem. We need to resolve the distortions that gerrymandering has created in representation. Think of this as good government solutions of sorts. The other part, which we have focused on, is actually a prerequisite for democracy. The condition for the existence of a democracy is that the people within the political society see themselves as part of the same political community, despite their differences. If they divide themselves into warring camps and see the other as the enemy, democracy cannot survive, no matter what kind of processes you create.
It has to be a CEO-to-CEO conversation because the program directors or program officers aren't necessarily in a position where they can reprogram or add new dollars. Number two is you have to have a compelling story. The Biden administration decided to try to fulfill this global methane pledge. The IRA was adopted. So you can go up to someone and say what you're doing is great. We also think that about what we do. But here's something new, and we can't afford to miss this opportunity. So we have to put money into it and here's a way to do that where we can really maximize the impact. And so it has a current story and a reason to change something, something that has changed in the world and that creates new opportunities.
How do you learn to do something? Start calling, asking, meeting people. A number of new financiers have come to me. When I came to Hewlett, I spent my first year meeting with CEOs from all the other major foundations just to learn from them. And then I developed relationships that I could continue to learn from. I'll share one thing that I think is being missed. The Hewletts got their start in philanthropy young when they founded the company in the 1940s. So by the time they launched their foundation in 1966 – and even more so by the time they professionalized it in 1977 – they were quite accomplished philanthropists. Many of these new financiers are actually in the same place as Bill and Flora were in the 1940s. It's just that they have a lot of money because they earned it very quickly. And so people are paying more attention, but they're going through the same journey as any philanthropist, which is figuring it out as they go along.
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