Abstract :-

During recent past, issues due to environmental degradation have come up in different parts of Sri Lanka due to various anthropogenic causes. Some of the recent environmental problems in the country have triggered the common citizens to proactively contribute to environmental sustainability. Social media has become a pragmatic force of communication during the past and ‘Wilpattu’ deforestation incident has been one such, which was criticized heavily, causing the responsible parties to collide with social media battles rather than take up the correct course of remedial action. Through the initial analyses conducted using available social media comments, it was evident that the general public was not made aware of the truth on time. Given the exploratory nature of this research, perceptions of several randomly selected individuals who are directly/ indirectly involved and not involved in the ‘Wilpattu’ incident have been interviewed to formulate several hypotheses and it is evident that, lack of effective communication of the environmental concern, quality of feedback, time delay and evidence of action taken up by responsible authorities were not transparent enough to the general public with concern to the ‘Wilpattu’ incident. In conclusion, it is proposed that an integrated e-service that can link the general public with the responsible authorities with positive and frequent feedbacks, is the clear solution for many if not all environmental related issues in Sri Lanka.

Keywords—E-government, environmental sustainability, e-service collaborative model