Producing Mobility, Withholding Authority: Epistemic Drain and Nursing Sovereignty in Nepal

ABSTRACT Global discussions of nursing in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs) are dominated by the language of shortage, staffing, retention, and migration. Although useful, this technocratic vocabulary obscures a deeper philosophical crisis: nurses may be numerically produced yet institutionally denied authority over knowledge, care, and professional futures. Using Nepal as a theory‐generating case, this conceptual article employs critical interpretive synthesis and philosophical analysis of nursing, policy, migration, and interdisciplinary scholarship to argue that the central problem is not workforce scarcity alone but a crisis of ‘nursing sovereignty’. The paper introduces three concepts. First, epistemic drain extends the idea of brain drain by naming the erosion of mentorship, pedagogical continuity, professional memory, policy voice, research capacity, and the public credibility of nursing knowledge. Second, professionalised for exit captures a paradox of production in which nursing education expands global mobility more readily than local authority, making migration a morally justified reaction to constrained socioeconomic prospects, rather than a lac