It was previously shown by one of us that in any static, non-globally-hyperbolic, spacetime, it is always possible to define a sensible dynamics for a Klein–Gordon scalar field. The prescription proposed for doing so involved viewing the spatial derivative part, A, of the wave operator as an operator on a certain L² Hilbert space and then defining a positive, self-adjoint operator on by taking the Friedrichs extension (or other positive extension) of A. However, this analysis left open the possibility that there could be other inequivalent prescriptions of a completely different nature that might also yield satisfactory definitions of the dynamics of a scalar field. We show here that this is not the case. Specifically, we show that if the dynamics agrees locally with the dynamics defined by the wave equation, if it admits a suitable conserved energy and if it satisfies certain other specified conditions, then it must correspond to the dynamics defined by choosing some positive, self-adjoint extension of A on . Thus, subject to our requirements, the previously given prescription is the only possible way of defining the dynamics of a scalar field in a static, non-globally-hyperbolic, spacetime. In a subsequent paper, this result will be applied to the analysis of scalar, electromagnetic and gravitational perturbations of anti-de Sitter spacetime. By doing so, we will determine all possible choices of boundary conditions at infinity in anti-de Sitter spacetime that give rise to sensible dynamics.