Her intellectual formation was shaped by Professors Jean-Robert Pitte, Paul Claval and Augustin Berque, and by Joël Bonnemaison, who supervised her doctoral research among fishing communities in Indonesia.
Dr Isabelle Antunès
Dr Isabelle Antunès is a development geographer with over thirty years of experience across Asia, Africa and the Pacific, working at the intersection of public policy, economic development and cultural geography.
She holds a PhD in Geography and Planning from the Sorbonne.
Her career has combined field expertise, policy advisory and the design and implementation of economic development initiatives. She has worked with governments and organisations including the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Making Cents International on the USAID-funded FIRMS project, French development cooperation, the German Sparkassenstiftung for International Cooperation (DSIK), and Sagem Security (now IDEMIA).
Her work has taken her from the fishing communities of Indonesia and Senegal to financial inclusion in Cameroon, territorial development in Bhutan and economic initiatives across Africa and Southeast Asia. She has helped design and pilot local fisheries governance institutions, develop financial inclusion approaches for entrepreneurs with irregular incomes, and connect territorial resources and knowledge with new economic possibilities.
She previously founded La Fabrique du Géographe, bringing geographical inquiry, economic development and documentary filmmaking together. Her films include Happy Rain, which explores how Bangladeshi communities transformed seasonal flooding into an economic opportunity, and Lady in Red (2006), a documentary on Senegal’s tomato industry. When the sector faced difficulties a decade later, Senegal’s river valley development agency, SAED, asked her to design a strategy to revive it.
She is co-author, with Serge Lemana Oyono, of Flavours of Influence: The Rise of Cameroon as a Food Power. The French and English editions received four Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in 2025, including Best of the Best (30 Years).
Building on this experience, she founded Soft Power Fabrique in Singapore, a studio working on the conditions of economic choice: helping places see what they already have, so they can choose what to build.
In her own words.
In the field, most projects I encountered started from what was missing: a gap to fill, a need to meet, a problem to solve.
Far fewer began with what was already there: the knowledge people held, the relationships they had built, the resources they knew how to use, or the possibilities that existing economic frameworks did not take into account.
Over time, I came to see that the difference was not simply one of means. It was also a question of what we chose to recognise, how we connected what already existed, and what those connections could make possible.
As a geographer, I learned to read places through their relationships. As a practitioner, I learned that changing those relationships could change economic outcomes.
I created Soft Power Fabrique to bring these two ways of working together.
From knowledge comes choice.
What would you like to make possible?