Should cleanliness drives be incentivized to encourage people in India?

Paying for civic behaviour displaces the motive the drive is meant to build

Question: Should cleanliness drives be incentivized to encourage people in India?
Position‹2 of 2: No, cleanliness drives should not be incentivized to encourage people in India
Argument1 of 2›: Paying for civic behaviour displaces the motive the drive is meant to build

The argument

The central objection to incentives is not that they fail to produce activity in the short term but that they change what the activity means, and in doing so destroy the thing a cleanliness drive exists to create. Critics argue that a drive is not really trying to get a particular street swept on a particular morning. It is trying to establish that keeping shared space clean is something people here do, which is a disposition rather than a task. Once participation is attached to a reward, the disposition is no longer what is being cultivated. The question a participant faces becomes whether the payment is worth the effort, and that is a question about price. The consequences follow from that reframing. Behaviour sustained by payment stops when payment stops, so the scheme has to continue indefinitely or lose what it bought. Participants who would have helped without being asked learn that such work is compensated, and some of them will decline to do it unpaid afterwards, which means the scheme can leave participation lower than it found it. Those who already contributed freely are placed in the position of having worked for nothing, which is a poor lesson to teach the people a drive most depends on. Critics add that the signal travels further than the scheme. A government that pays its citizens to clean their own surroundings communicates that this is not ordinarily their responsibility, and that framing is hard to withdraw once established. On this view the apparent success of an incentivised drive measures the money spent rather than any change in civic habit, and the habit was the entire point.

Premises

[P1]A cleanliness drive aims to establish a disposition about shared space rather than to accomplish a particular quantity of cleaning. [P2] Attaching a reward reframes participation as a transaction, so the participant's question becomes whether the price is adequate rather than whether the act is theirs to do. [P3] Behaviour sustained by payment ceases when payment ceases, and those who previously contributed freely learn that such work is compensated. [P4] A scheme can therefore leave voluntary participation lower than it found it, while signalling that cleanliness is not ordinarily a citizen's responsibility. [C] Cleanliness drives should not be incentivised, because the payment buys activity at the cost of the disposition the drive exists to build.

Counter-arguments

Proponents answer that motivation is not as fragile as this assumes, and that displacement is a property of how a reward is framed rather than of rewards as such. Recognition, community awards and collective rather than individual rewards all attach a benefit to participation while presenting it as honour rather than wages, and these have been used widely without evidence that civic feeling collapsed. They add that the argument protects a disposition that may not exist in the relevant places: where participation is already near zero, there is little intrinsic motive to crowd out, and refusing to act until one appears is a decision to leave the street as it is.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Displacement depends on how a reward is framed rather than on rewards as such, since recognition, community awards and collective prizes attach a benefit to participation while presenting it as honour rather than wages. [Rejecting P4] The argument assumes a stock of voluntary participation that can be reduced, but where participation is already near zero there is little intrinsic motive to crowd out and therefore little to lose. [Rejecting C] Protecting a disposition that has not yet appeared is a decision to leave the street in its present condition, which is a cost the conclusion does not weigh.