Larry Kramer, outgoing CEO of mega climate funder the Hewlett Foundation, looks back on his tenure

Larry Kramer, longtime president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, doesn’t think it’s healthy for an executive to lead the same organization for more than 15 years. The problem, he says, is that it takes 10 years for a leader to get anything done.

Nevertheless, Kramer, known for his early support of the fight against climate change, will make his own deadline. At the end of 2023, he will step down from his role from the organization he has led since 2012.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Kramer talks about how Hewlett became the largest climate funder in the world from 2007 to 2018, as well as started funding around cybersecurity, political polarization in the context of democracy and reimagining capitalism.

“We’re really broadly across the field,” Kramer says about Hewlett’s climate funding. “When we spot problems, we’ll start (working on) them and people will often follow. And that’s been true of a number of things in recent years, whether it’s carbon dioxide removal, finance, there’s a number of different areas.”

An expert in constitutional law, Kramer will go on to be the 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 was edited for clarity and length.

I don’t want to answer it in terms of specific policies because there are a whole lot of specific policies that could do that. The challenge is making 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 replaces it?

So if you think about the crumbling of the laissez faire paradigm in the 1920s and the wake of World War I and the Great Depression, it wasn’t clear what would supersede. A lot of people became fascists, and a lot of people became communists. I think we’re in a similar period of uncertainty, which is a big part of the political turmoil that you had then and you have now. You had in the 1960s when the Keynesian order collapsed and neoliberalism ended up taking place. That wasn’t a given. So I think everything is being renegotiated. We see the rise of authoritarianism and ethnonationalism filling that gap too. That’s not a good outcome. So we have to offer people something better

I think you can break the philanthropic contributions down into two separate pieces. The one piece, the more common…