In recent years, there has been considerable interest in theories formulated in anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime. However, AdS spacetime fails to be globally hyperbolic, so a classical field satisfying a hyperbolic wave equation on AdS spacetime need not have a well-defined dynamics. Nevertheless, AdS spacetime is static, so the possible rules of dynamics for a field satisfying a linear wave equation are constrained by our previous general analysis—given in paper II—where it was shown that the possible choices of dynamics correspond to choices of positive, self-adjoint extensions of a certain differential operator, A. In the present paper, we reduce the analysis of electromagnetic and gravitational perturbations in AdS spacetime to scalar wave equations. We then apply our general results to analyse the possible dynamics of scalar, electromagnetic and gravitational perturbations in AdS spacetime. In AdS spacetime, the freedom (if any) in choosing self-adjoint extensions of A corresponds to the freedom (if any) in choosing suitable boundary conditions at infinity, so our analysis determines all the possible boundary conditions that can be imposed at infinity. In particular, we show that other boundary conditions besides the Dirichlet and Neumann conditions may be possible, depending on the value of the effective mass for scalar field perturbations, and depending on the number of spacetime dimensions and type of mode for electromagnetic and gravitational perturbations.